Enhanced Student Evaluation Software in Engineering and Science Courses

We developed a software program to implement an improved grading technique in agreement with the factual processing of grades, in which the main mathematical operation employed is the arithmetic mean. The grading process usually involves the scaling of raw scores, which may sometimes significantly distort the grading operation. Meaningful results can be obtained only when equivalent scales are employed; otherwise, distortions of the grades and aggregated grades may result. In order to alleviate these problems our grading method is improved with respect to the use of arithmetic mean. The developed grading software not only embeds the theoretical principles backing the method but also significantly simplifies the rather difficult task of grading. By simply setting the limits for different letter grade categories the appropriate grades are generated from raw scores, according to student performance. It is meant to make this non-statistical method accessible for use with minimum effort and maximum practical efficiency and we believe that it can be very useful for many engineering and science instructors and for their students. The application is written in the C# programming language with the capability to import and export a comma-delimited text format for use with commercial software packages.