Maximizing Lab Report Feedback While Minimizing Grading Time

Over the summer a blog post caught my eye because it mentioned giving feedback to students without taking hours.  I loved this idea, since grading AP Biology formal lab reports takes forever. The post in Mrs. Brosseau's Binder reminded me that often I am writing the same comments on students' labs. I put together a Google form, trying to remember the most common comments I give when grading labs. I added all of the possible comments in the form and then also added the option "other" which allows me to type in whatever comments I might want to add that are not already on the list.

Here is the link to my Lab Grading Google Form.

I needed a way to take the information from the form that goes into a spreadsheet to give individual feedback to students.  One way to do that would be with the form add-on docAppender.  For my classes though, I found that the add-on autoCrat in Sheets worked best for me.  I needed to make a template for my feedback to go in, and then autoCrat makes a document for each student whose lab I grade. It took me a little while to figure out how I wanted the template to look and to get all of the tabs in to map the information from the Sheet into the template. Now when I grade lab reports, I can give my students rich feedback in a nicely formatted document. Then I just drag the newly made documents into the Google Drive folders that I share with my students. I love it!

Here's the link to the Lab Grade Template that autoCrat merges for me.

Grading labs comes down to these steps:

1. Create a Google Form to use when grading labs (or use mine).
   
2. Grade labs by clicking the comment choices in the form, or adding other comments as needed in the "other" option in the form.
   
3. Once you have graded the labs, go to the Sheet that is created from the form responses.
   
4. Make sure to install the autoCrat add-on from the add-ons menu.
   
   
   
   
5. Start up autoCrat and answer the questions it asks--such as which template to use for the merge.  You can already have one that you've made or use mine. 
   
   
6. After answering questions, start the merge, and viola! you have documents of feedback for each of your students.
   

One other explanation of my form.  I grade each section of my students' labs with a rubric using a score range of 1 to 4, but each section of the lab gets weighted differently.  In the end, it all adds up to 100 points.  I add the formula to calculate that in sheets so I don't have to.  Here is the rubric I use for grading labs.