The Problem / Opportunity
Despite the growth of online assessments, there are still many contexts in which tests must be given offline. Some students require modified assessments, some educators are uncomfortable with online tests, not all students have digital devices, and Internet connectivity isn’t always dependable. Unfortunately, the time and effort to grade offline assessments is onerous for teachers. Paperscorer is a startup focused on creating a more affordable and flexible solution for administering and grading offline assessments.
The Process
Using an onshore Product/Project Manager and dedicated team of developers and QA engineers in our Noida, India office, we developed series of web services, LTI extensions and Android/iOS apps to:
- Generate print bubble sheets and question sheets on regular paper.
- Auto graded images captured of the answer sheets
- Capture images quickly with mobile devices
- Extend LMS quizzing tools to enable paper-based scoring
- Automatically send grades back to LMS gradebooks
INnovative Concepts - Web services and LMS integration
All of the competing products offered stand-alone websites with assessment reports separate from school LMS or gradebooks. The problem with this approach is that it requires educators to use multiple systems. Given the growing adoption of learning management systems in both K12 and Higher Ed, we made the decision to build Paperscorer as a series of web-services for which all processing would be done on the server. We then build a series of integrations with the fastest growing LMS and assessment systems.