What is SmartGrader?
SmartGrader is an online academic affairs management web service. It provides extraordinary ability to measure and analyze staff and students' performance. It also automates many repetitive manual tasks so the administration can focus on improving academic standards.
Why another school management solution?
Issues with currently available solutions:
- Focus on activities peripheral to learning (eg. record keeping, library, transport, attendance)
- Poor user interface requiring dozens of clicks to navigate through frequently accessed information
- Unreliability of the system - caused by frequent virus attacks, server crashes etc - leading to duplicating every record manually
- Requirement of quality system administrator who can protect the system against virus attacks, hardware failures, manage compatibilty of different components of the system (operating system, database server, application server) etc thereby increasing the total cost of ownership
- Accessible from only within the school. To make information available to parents, schools have another system that is on the web to which data is synchronized periodically. The number of outdated school websites prove that this synchronization happens once in a few years!!
The SmartGrader advantage:
- Focus on management and measurement of performance of curriculum and student learning. And of course, student records, staff records, attendance, SMS, email etc
- Secure the institution's intellectual property - lesson plans, teaching strategies, question papers, test scores
- Provide analytical capability to slice and dice data for day to day decisions
- Zero software installation and maintenance in the school's premises
- Void the need for a seasoned system administrator
- Controlled access to any authorized user from anywhere in the world
For school management
- 1) How does the school benefit from SmartGrader?
- 2) How do I use it in my school?
- 3) But... we always buy software and install it on our machines...
- 4) But we already have our school website on an external hosted service and have not had any problems so far!!
- 5) We have computer teachers in our school. They can handle the security...
- 6) But all these security concerns are applicable to you also...
- 7) Anything else...
- 8) How much will it cost?
- 9) Can I see a demo?
SmartGrader is like a dashboard that keeps you updated on the health of your school. Critical events like lesson plans going behind schedule, prolonged absentions, below average performers in assessments etc will be escalated to your view automatically. So, the effort you would have had to expend to even identify the problems can now be spent on solving the problems. Leaving you enough time to improve on the 'non-problem' areas!
All information regarding students and staff, their personal details, attendance records, test and exam scores (in case of students) are stored in a centralized database. This database itself is strictly access controlled so that except for the head of the school other users will not be able to edit or even see personal information of their peers. This accumulation of data in one place helps greatly at the time of promotions (for students) and appraisals (for staff).
In fact, at the time of promotions, it is as easy as selecting each students' record and after due diligence, just clicking on the promote (or detain) button as applicable will automatically generate a printable page along with the address of the student printed on it so that it can be just put in an envelop and mailed. Absolutely no chance of mix-ups and tremendous amount of work saved! If desired, you can also send the promotion status as an SMS at the click of a button.
During staff appraisals, authentic data can be used to compare average / aggregate student performances in courses taught by the staff vis-a-vis other teachers who teach the same course albeit to different sections. It can be used to set measurable targets for teachers.
It keeps parents updated on their child's academic progress and other critical events like absences, assessment results etc. on a daily basis. This boosts parents' confidence that their children are in the care of a responsible and responsve administration. A weekly or monthly or per term dossier containing the student's performance during that period can be emailed or printed and handed over to parents.
Another feature that has to be necessarily mentioned is the admission management system. This will greatly remove the enormous stress and effort for the staff AND the parents during the admission process. Snaking queues of disgruntled parents outside your school will be a thing of the past. This will greatly enhance your schools reputation in the community.
All information regarding students and staff, their personal details, attendance records, test and exam scores (in case of students) are stored in a centralized database. This database itself is strictly access controlled so that except for the head of the school other users will not be able to edit or even see personal information of their peers. This accumulation of data in one place helps greatly at the time of promotions (for students) and appraisals (for staff).
In fact, at the time of promotions, it is as easy as selecting each students' record and after due diligence, just clicking on the promote (or detain) button as applicable will automatically generate a printable page along with the address of the student printed on it so that it can be just put in an envelop and mailed. Absolutely no chance of mix-ups and tremendous amount of work saved! If desired, you can also send the promotion status as an SMS at the click of a button.
During staff appraisals, authentic data can be used to compare average / aggregate student performances in courses taught by the staff vis-a-vis other teachers who teach the same course albeit to different sections. It can be used to set measurable targets for teachers.
It keeps parents updated on their child's academic progress and other critical events like absences, assessment results etc. on a daily basis. This boosts parents' confidence that their children are in the care of a responsible and responsve administration. A weekly or monthly or per term dossier containing the student's performance during that period can be emailed or printed and handed over to parents.
Another feature that has to be necessarily mentioned is the admission management system. This will greatly remove the enormous stress and effort for the staff AND the parents during the admission process. Snaking queues of disgruntled parents outside your school will be a thing of the past. This will greatly enhance your schools reputation in the community.
SmartGrader is delivered as a web based service. Meaning, we run the software on our servers and you access it using your browser on an internet connected computer. Much like how you access your web mail service like gmail, yahoo mail, msn etc.
Thats how software has been traditionally delivered. But times are a'changing. Security is a big issue now and it is just not feasible for a school to afford people with skills to run a secure IT service - especially a service that is available over the internet.
Also, apart from the software application, you'll also have to buy database server software, web application server software and the hardware that runs these. And if you want the service to be ALWAYS available then you'll have to buy two of everything at a minimum!
Next is the hardware and network performance. By nature, this application gets heavily used in spurts - like on the day results are declared. When you run it yourself the hardware and the network will not be provisioned to handle these sudden spikes in load. And it will fail at exactly the moment when it is most required by users.
Also, apart from the software application, you'll also have to buy database server software, web application server software and the hardware that runs these. And if you want the service to be ALWAYS available then you'll have to buy two of everything at a minimum!
Next is the hardware and network performance. By nature, this application gets heavily used in spurts - like on the day results are declared. When you run it yourself the hardware and the network will not be provisioned to handle these sudden spikes in load. And it will fail at exactly the moment when it is most required by users.
A web application is a completely different beast from a site that serves static html files which do not accept user input. The moment you put a login and password text input box on your site, it attracts the bad guys like honey attracts bees. In poorly constructed applications there are techniques like SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting etc that can give an attacker complete access to sensitive data on your servers or users sessions. And the bad guy does not even have to know the username, leave alone the password! Your school's reputation might get sullied overnight.
Information security is a specialized subject that can trip even experienced programmers. Sorry to say, but your computer teachers are no match to the bad guys out there. You dont expect your physics teacher to design buildings or your zoology teacher to operate on your students or your NCC staff to tackle terrorists, do you!! Though cheeky, the analogy above is pretty apt.
True. But this is our full time job. Just as you are good at running your school, we are good at running safe and secure services. We monitor the server logs on a continous basis and take corrective action whenever we notice any anomaly. Also we continously fine tune and upgrade our software so that such incidences are at the barest minimum levels possible.
Yes. When we deliver it as a service, we handle data backups on a daily basis. So your data is never lost. Also whenever we introduce new features it will be available to you the next time you login. At no extra cost.
Its priced on a per student per year subscription basis. While we want to disclose the subscription rates AFTER you see a demo of the full application, we can assure you it will be much less than buying your own hardware and software and hiring a qualified system administrator who can captain a secure and reliable system.
Send a mail to info@smartgrader.com to arrange for a live demo.
Send a mail to info@smartgrader.com to arrange for a live demo.
If you are in or around Chennai, yes! If you are elsewhere, do contact us. We will see if we can arrange something.
Email info@smartgrader.com.
Email info@smartgrader.com.
For Teachers
- 1) As a teacher, how do I benefit?
- 2) And there's the question bank...
We need not tell you how boring and thankless a job calculating scores, totals, ranks, averages of tests and exams are! Not after you start using SmartGrader. All you would have to do is just enter each subject score of each student. The calculation of totals, averages, ranks and percentiles for each subject and at the aggregate level for each section as well as all sections collectively are all completely automatic.
The hours of mind numbing effort spent on this can now be used to analyze students' performance. So, the poor performers can be identified and extra effort spent on them. And, importantly, the top performers can be identified and more challenges given to them.
Because this task has become so easy you can do it even for your weekly tests. Or even for your daily continuous assessments! Such fine grained analysis of your students' performance is well nigh impossible without a tool like this.
Because all statistics are calculated at the section level as well as at the grade level, this is an excellent tool to compare your own performance with that of teachers who teach the same course to other sections. You can benchmark yourself and also set your own targets for performance improvement. This will prove quite handy to make yourself a strong case at the time of appraisals.
The hours of mind numbing effort spent on this can now be used to analyze students' performance. So, the poor performers can be identified and extra effort spent on them. And, importantly, the top performers can be identified and more challenges given to them.
Because this task has become so easy you can do it even for your weekly tests. Or even for your daily continuous assessments! Such fine grained analysis of your students' performance is well nigh impossible without a tool like this.
Because all statistics are calculated at the section level as well as at the grade level, this is an excellent tool to compare your own performance with that of teachers who teach the same course to other sections. You can benchmark yourself and also set your own targets for performance improvement. This will prove quite handy to make yourself a strong case at the time of appraisals.
There is a question bank associated with each course. All teachers who teach that course can contribute to this question bank. Each question will be assigned difficulty level, score for correct answer, outline of the correct answer, choices (in case of objective type questions) and the relevant part of the syllabus this question is related to. This level of granularity will help in identifying which students have fared badly (or well) in which specific concept.
Not to mention the clearly assigned authorship so that you can take pride in the challenging questions that you have formulated.
Not to mention the clearly assigned authorship so that you can take pride in the challenging questions that you have formulated.
For Parents
- 1) I'm a parent. How do I benefit?
SmartGrader allows you to be in touch with your child's progress at school on a day to day basis. Important events like your child's absence from school, assessment results, sudden declaration of holidays etc will be sent to you by SMS. You will get email (and / or printed) summaries of your child's progress every week/month/term. By logging into the system (anytime and from anywhere in the world) you can analyze how your child's performance compares with others in the same section as well as others in all sections.
Your child's academic history is stored in one place. This will come in handy when you want to analyze your child's strengths and weaknesses to help him/her decide on a suitable field to pursue.
Because it removes a lot of manual work of the teachers, they can spend more time on academic activities, thus benefitting your child.
Your child's academic history is stored in one place. This will come in handy when you want to analyze your child's strengths and weaknesses to help him/her decide on a suitable field to pursue.
Because it removes a lot of manual work of the teachers, they can spend more time on academic activities, thus benefitting your child.
For Students
- 1) I'm a student. How will I benefit?
The very raison d'etre of SmartGrader is your overall betterment. All that is taught at school (and college) is no bigger than an atom at the tip of an iceberg floating on an ocean contained on a planet in the solar system .... well, you get the point, right?
Schools (and colleges) only attempt to teach you the alphabets of knowledge. Just as knowing the alphabets of a language is essential to build words and form sentences and learn and think in that language, it is essential to learn the alphabets of knowledge to build ideas, form concepts and analyze and solve problems in whichever career you choose. A school has done its job if it has taught you how to learn! The rest is yours.
It is important that you realize that what is there in your text book is only a very very very basic sampling of the world out there! The real world does not follow text books. Success purely depends on your ability to use the knowledge gained about the basic samples and extrapolate it to solve more comlex real world problems. In any field! It is called 'Higher Order Thinking' capability.
So, stop looking at education as being able to exactly replicate what is there in your text books. Search the vast resources available on the internet and read and understand from different view points the same topics in your text book. That's where SmartGrader steps in. It will help you get started on this journey of using the internet to enjoy the art of learning. Remember, it can only get you started. To move on and run is in your own hands!
An American Nobel prize winner, who had quite a few Indian assistants, was once asked what he thought of them. He said that while they are among the best at solving a given problem they seem to be poor at formulating problems to solve!! Without the ability to formulate problems to solve (to put it simply... the ability to ask questions) all the knowledge you have crammed up will only let you be appreciated assistants! Not the Nobel prize winner.
So, learn to ask tough questions. Not to pose it to others but to find the answer yourself! If others can answer it, it was not tough in the first place :-)
Schools (and colleges) only attempt to teach you the alphabets of knowledge. Just as knowing the alphabets of a language is essential to build words and form sentences and learn and think in that language, it is essential to learn the alphabets of knowledge to build ideas, form concepts and analyze and solve problems in whichever career you choose. A school has done its job if it has taught you how to learn! The rest is yours.
It is important that you realize that what is there in your text book is only a very very very basic sampling of the world out there! The real world does not follow text books. Success purely depends on your ability to use the knowledge gained about the basic samples and extrapolate it to solve more comlex real world problems. In any field! It is called 'Higher Order Thinking' capability.
So, stop looking at education as being able to exactly replicate what is there in your text books. Search the vast resources available on the internet and read and understand from different view points the same topics in your text book. That's where SmartGrader steps in. It will help you get started on this journey of using the internet to enjoy the art of learning. Remember, it can only get you started. To move on and run is in your own hands!
An American Nobel prize winner, who had quite a few Indian assistants, was once asked what he thought of them. He said that while they are among the best at solving a given problem they seem to be poor at formulating problems to solve!! Without the ability to formulate problems to solve (to put it simply... the ability to ask questions) all the knowledge you have crammed up will only let you be appreciated assistants! Not the Nobel prize winner.
So, learn to ask tough questions. Not to pose it to others but to find the answer yourself! If others can answer it, it was not tough in the first place :-)
Public exam results
Analytical tool to gauge performance in the Tamil Nadu state board public exams.
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