Google Sheets for Realtime Assessment and Analysis of Less-Structured Problems

Universities are under increasing pressures for efficiencies in education with declining budgets, increasing enrollments, and increasing expectations/accountability by students. A traditional approach with engineering or science computations is to parse the answers into a multiple choice selection. Grading of these problems is efficient and has evolved from Scantron systems to Clickers, to open source online solutions such as Moodle, Google Forms, or WebWORK. This method does have its limitations. An investment of time is required in identifying the array of possible answers. In addition, multiple choice questions allow a student to provide guesses when they might not have an idea how to approach the problem. In the grading that is performed as a batch, the instructor loses the temporal resolution which is most helpful in determining which areas are giving students particular issues. The controlled sharing and import of individual data through Google Sheets provides educators an opportunity to utilize a spreadsheet for collecting and assessing answers real-time. This is easy to do in a manner where all students see all answers, but individual shared sheets can be setup to provide a private interaction with each student. There are several advantages to this system over many current approaches: students can continue to change their answers until the time that the instructor "grades" the assignment, the instructor has a real-time view of the student's answers and grades at any instant (with the opportunity to provide direction), tolerance values can be built in along with a median value of student answers, and sort features in Google provide real-time information on the students and concepts that are having the most issues. This approach has been piloted in a Capstone Senior Design class for Chemical Engineering where structured concepts were taught and assessed (economics, relief sizing, etc.) and openended designs were utilized (where the instructor did not have a "right"/"wrong" answer, but significant deviations could be discerned).