Introduction
Eyegrade uses a webcam to grade MCQ (multiple choice question) exams. Needing just a cheap low-end webcam, it aims to be a low-cost and portable solution available to everyone, on the contrary to other solutions based on scanners. The program is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or any later version.
Eyegrade is still alpha. It is fully functional and has been used in several courses at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in the last two years. Its use is encouraged for tech-savvy people. However, it still needs great improvements in its user-friendliness in order to be usable for the general public.
Its source code is hosted at Github: jfisteus/eyegrade. Bug reports, feature requests and pull requests are welcome there.
The main features of Eyegrade are:
- Exam typesetting: Although you can create your exams with other tools, Eyegrade integrates an utility to creating MCQ exams. It is able to create your exams in PDF format. Eyegrade can automatically build several versions of the exam by reordering questions and choices within questions.
- Grading exams: Using a webcam, the graphical user interface of Eyegrade allows you to grade your exam. Eyegrade is able to recognize not only the answers to the questions, but also the identity of the student by using its hand-written digit cognition module. The whole process is supervised by the user in order to detect and fix potential errors of the system.
- Extracting statistics: you can view question-by-question statistics in order to analyze which topics are clear to the majority of your students, and which topics need further work.
- Exporting grades: grades can be exported in CSV format, compatible with other programs such as spreadsheets.
Here is a short demonstration video:
And a screenshot:
Eyegrade, copyright 2010-2012