Tutorial 7: the Detail view

If you want a per-student, per-question, per-attempt view of your results, come to

Assignments tab -> Results -> Results in Detail

You will see you have the traditional traffic-light colour-coding for correct, partial and incorrect answers.

Grey cells are questions that were not presented. The Yacapaca model is that each quiz is a randomised selection of questions from an underlying question bank. You choose how Continue reading →

What is Structured Peer Assessment?

Getting students to mark each others’ work has two huge advantage – it is brilliantly formative and it saves you a ton of time. But how accurate is it? And how do you validate that it really is helping students learn?

Structured Peer Assessment (SPA) is our patented system to deliver accurate, demonstrably-formative peer assessment. Here is what it looks like from the student perspective. Continue reading →

This one small accounting change could save every teacher 8 hours per week

Here is a fairly typical budget for a smallish 5-teacher department in a mid-sized secondary school:

Salaries for 5 teachers (inc. employers’ NI) £215,000
Discretionary (“materials”) budget £1,500

There is a third item that is usually accounted separately, cost of cover staff. If the average teacher is off for 1 week per year – whether for illness, external training or other reasons, they are covered by a supply teacher costing the school around £200/day.

£200 * 5 teachers * 5 days per year = £5,000/year.

Cover staff are notoriously Continue reading →

How much does your school spend on marking?

I have yet to meet a single head or senior teacher who can answer this off the top of their heads, but it is easy to work out using government-published figures.

Teachers work 55.7 hours/week total¹, and spend 9.4 hours/week marking². That’s 17%.
The average teacher salary is £28,951³, but we have to add the employer’s NI contribution of 13.8% to give an employer cost of £32,946, ignoring all overheads.
17% of £32,946 of is £5,601. That’s what we spend on marking per teacher, per year.
The average secondary school employs 65⁴ qualified teachers, so the total cost per school is £364,053.

I’ll repeat that. The average state secondary school spends well over a third of a Continue reading →

Set an exam using Quick Assignments

Sam Hucker from Winterbourne International Academy asked me this question this morning:

I have set up a partial exam for my BTEC Engineering students. Is there a way that I can set up further questions where they have to type paragraphs or free sentences in larger
quantities? Continue reading →