About forty years ago I came up with a way to make it easier for students to take exams and professors to grade them. Have a roomful of terminals or desktop computers ' this was long before students had laptops ' running a simple word processor. The exam questions are on the screen, the students type in their answers. I called it Electric Bluebook. It is easier to write with a word processor than a pen and easier for someone else to read what has been written. To make things easier for the student, the software would display a page listing questions and letting him mark each as not yet done, completed, given up on, or to be looked at again if there is time. When the students were finished, all of the exams would be transferred to the professor's computer for grading. It is easier to grade exams and comment on them if you grade all the answers to each question before moving on to the next. The computer lets you do that without having to shuffle bluebooks. A professor might get more...
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