Advantages | Beyond Multiple Choice

The CRC tool eliminates reading hundreds of student responses

In courses with hundreds of students, common in many introductory college STEM courses, evaluating student responses effectively is a challenge. High school teachers are often responsible for teaching the same content to several classes of students, that when summed, can be over 100 students in a day. The BMC tool can analyze hundreds to thousands of student responses in a few minutes! This saves the instructor from spending time reading and evaluating individual responses. Further, the results from automated analysis can reveal patterns in student answers that are difficult to pinpoint reading answers one-by one!

Questions and models have been tested

Our questions and scoring models have been developed using a diverse set of student responses. These questions have been used in a number of schools and have been designed to capture a variety of common student ideas in students' own words. We routinely update our scoring models to expand the training data and ensure the models continue to be as accurate as possible.

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Questions address core STEM concepts

Our questions assess key disciplinary ideas in STEM and reveal students' conceptual thinking. Our questions prompt students to construct explanations or make predictions, which are authentic scientific practices.

Reports reveal complex student thinking

When you assign the developed assessment items in your course and have the results scored by our automated scoring models, you will receive a richly detailed report that gives you new insight into what your students are thinking and where they are encountering difficulties. These reports show the ideas and text used by your students. In particular, you can see the prevalence of specific ideas or the level of achievement of your students. Since students usually do not have only "right" or only "wrong" ideas, understanding the complex mix of student ideas is valuable when considering instructional approaches. Our reports can help reveal these complex connections! You can view sample reports for most questions after logging in.

Everyone knows what the problems are, but I think that... a way to come up with questions to address those issues are difficult. You guys did a great job.

Instructor from Stony Brook University

I already understand that students struggle with this and this [report] provides me with more input to better understand why they struggle with it

Introductory Biology Professor from Michigan State University