Our New Years Resolutions

The New Year is always a good time to reflect, but it is also a good time to look forward.

Taking time to carefully choose goals and objectives for the next year can help guide and shape your next 365 days.

So without further ado, here are five new things the SAGrader team is looking forward to exploring and implementing in 2010.

1. Course Libraries: Course Libraries will make it easier for you to identify the lessons and assignments you use in your class. It eliminates the process of building SAGrader content exclusively for your class. We already have libraries built for Psychology, Sociology, Social Deviance, Social Psychology and Research Methods. If you don’t see a course that fits your needs, don’t worry because our next new feature will help you out.
2. Partnerships/Authors: We are going to start actively seeking professors and teachers for content area courses to help build additional libraries. If you are interested in seeing a library built to fit your course, let us know and we’ll see what we can do to start partnering with you.
3. More robust grading engine: We’re exploring the possibility of adding some general writing style metrics to our grading engine. While maintaining our focus on assessing content, these new metrics could help us critique things like spelling, grammar and word choice.
4. Similarity Detection: Our revamped similarity detector is currently being tested to make sure it’s ready for prime time. The similarity detector identifies students who may be reusing work from other students, even across semesters!
5. New and Improved Website: We’re working to make our website more helpful by reworking the copy, and providing more resources like customer testimonials and links to our academic research.

So there you have it. The five big new things we plan on bringing to SAGrader in the new year. If you have any thoughts, suggestions or other ideas for us, please let us know in the comments.