[ARCHIVED] Automated Essay Grader that Integrates with Canvas Quizzes

[sgiedieviells]

Hi All, 

I'm interested in looking into automated essay grading tools that integrates with Canvas quizzes. This would help faculty grade essay questions in exams more quickly and catch any plagiarism/mistakes.

Does anyone have any recommendations or insights? 

Thank you!

[Steven_S]

I am not aware of an automatic grader.  I'm not sure I would trust something automatic to confirm that an essay contain an accurate response.  Grammar and plagiarism on the other hand might be possible.

If you use turnitin for plagiarism you might like to comment in: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/New-Quizzes-Allow-use-of-turnitin/idi-p/331350

Otherwise you might like to comment on: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/Download-essay-questions/idi-p/319728 which would allow instructors to quickly download all essay responses for submission to whichever plagiarism checker the school subscribes to.

Our school uses grammarly.edu (the .edu is important to differentiate from normal grammarly) for plagiarism, because it also provides some automatic grammar feedback to students.  It is good at spotting sentences that need work, but not always correct about the best way to fix the sentence.  I suggested an idea for integrating that with canvas, but in this new community it seems to have landed in something called "colder storage" that I do not have access to.  I guess canvas does not want to integrate with grammarly.  That's too bad, but we can still download student submissions from canvas and upload them into grammarly.edu, check for grammar and plagiarism both in that program, save a report and attach that report to comments in canvas. 

[sgiedieviells]

Hey Steven,

Thanks for you reply. Turnitin is a great solution for plagiarism!

I previously worked with Moodle which has a native auto-essay grader for short answers and essay questions that allows instructors to target key phrases to help the grading process. Instructors still manually graded, but it helped a bit. I was wondering if there were any plugins that worked similarly with Canvas. 

Thanks!

[Steven_S]

I am not aware of any feature of canvas that lets instructors search essays for key phrases.  In speedgrader there is an integrated feature that lets instructors leave comments on the actual document, which might achieve part of your goal.  For an internal canvas tool that does everything you are looking for, you might need to start an idea conversation https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/idb-p/ideas

There are countless LTI's  that you can integrate with canvas.  I don't have access to turnitin in the school where I use canvas, but I have used it elsewhere and it does a reasonable job of plagiarism detection, plus it has an integrated feature for adding mark-ups on the document, including pre-generated comments in many categories.  Turnitin does have a canvas integration, if your school subscribes to turnitin. Our school uses grammarly.edu because it gives students direct access to the scans so they can fix grammar and plagiarism issues themselves.  There is not a canvas integration with grammarly.edu though it would make the tool much more functional.