E for Ease in E-Grading.

The article presents information on the method of electronic grading (e-grading) used by the author to grade essays and research papers. The author used the Protect Document feature of the Word software by Microsoft Corp. to grade an essay sent by a student. He found this grading technique far less time-consuming than either the color-coded method or hand grading. He explained e-grading to students and invited them to submit their works as e-mail attachments. In the Protect Document feature, any additions to the text will be in red and underlined; the deleted text will appear to the right in a deleted-text bubble. In the most recent version of the Word software, deletions are tracked in the bubbles to the right, and dotted lines point to deletion locations. E-grading offers tracking benefits as electronically submitted assignments can be kept on a CD, which proves invaluable if the data gets lost.