Google Forms Quizzes!

Can I Have It Auto-Grade?

I frequently get the question about how to create quizzes that will be automatically graded.  If you already have a quiz you are planning on using, you might as well take advantage of it being fully automated, right? It saves a great amount of time if you are planning on administering a quick quiz all based on multiple choice or true and false. 

Toward the end of June, Google launched the ability to create graded quizzes via Google Forms. Using a Google Sheets add-on (Flubaroo) is no longer necessary to accomplish this task. Teachers can quickly make a quiz, set the correct answers, and instantly have all the results within their Google Form. If you are wanting something quick and extremely user-friendly, this is the route to go. If you are wanting to have more control over point values and weighted grades, Flubaroo is much more feature-rich as it has been in existence much longer. Both tools are great, I recommend trying them both. Why not? They are both free. 

Create a Form Quiz

Thoughts about Assessment

Though I get the question about automatically grading quizzes/tests often, I also get a lot of questions regarding students cheating. Yes, Google Forms makes it extremely easy to digitize and automate your test, but ultimately multiple choice and true/false questions make it easy for students to cheat. If your question is easy to Google, then it is easy to cheat. So how do we get around the issue of cheating?

I think back to my freshman year of college and there was one type of test I hated the most; the blue-book exam. It was painfully difficult because I had one massive question to cover a ton of information. These tests were painful to complete in comparison to multiple choice, but it forced me to demonstrate what I really knew. It was completely focused on my thought process about the information I took in from the class. 

What if teachers focused on the process more than a right or wrong answers? For example, what if math teachers had students create a video explaining how they solved a problem? You could use a fancy Orange Slice Rubric to hit on multiple facets of the problem-solving process instead of grading a ten to twenty question test. This would eliminate the issue of cheating as the teacher would be able to hear the student verbalize his/her understanding of the problem. 

So you have to decide what is more important to you as the teacher. Is the convenience of having a quiz automatically graded worth the stronger possibility of cheating, or is the amount of time grading a learning process worth making a test "Google-proof?"