The grading process for teachers, teachers assistants, and professors can be a big challenge, especially as the student count per educator increases. For the students, receiving those grades is also a challenge, between having to get assignments to the teacher in time, then waiting an unknown amount of time to get back the score can be emotional. Some technologies have come around to try and enhance that experience, but as our host Daniele can attest, those technologies tend to come with a caveat: a lack of feedback. A new platform, Crowdmark, recognized all of these issues and set out to address them.

One of the big focuses of the platform is providing meaningful feedback to the students. This can be done in a couple of different ways. First, the teacher can create a collection of pre-defined comments, each with an assigned score. The teacher and their assistants can then use that as a rubric to score assignments easily and uniformly. However, sometimes something happens that just doesn't fit into the pre-defined. Then, the grader can enter a custom comment and score it as needed. This makes the process more fair for students that are in a large group, including those submitting papers for competitions and contests.

For students, the benefit of feedback is obvious. If you get useful information about what you did right and what you did wrong, you can try to get better at that particular topic. The feedback received from instructors through Caremark has become so important to students that one of the schools using the platform has a dedicated channel on Reddit called "Caremark Flex" in which students share their biggest, most impressive feedback.

Caremark is looking to expand its reach to new colleges and universities. For more information about the platform and to contact the company about bringing it into your school, check out their website.