Well, two quick responses on how to grade paperless assingments and I think we see variations of philosophies here. Dr. Rzepa wrote:

As a IT project, its not a problem since one is looking for content, presentation etc.... Not sure how I would cope with organic reaction mechanism etc.

I assume "IT" stands for "information technology". In which case, yes, how the material is presented in the electronic media would be the major determining factor for the grade. Still, it would seem awkward to me how one can point out the student's errors without writing something down. I think Dr. Rzepa's last statement is very telling. I think there are many situations where a paperless situation will simply not be practical. Then, Dr. Singer wrote:

there's no essential difference in marking sumbitted coursework on paper or in an electronic document. As I stated earlier I favour email submission of work as wordprocessor or spreadsheet file attachments to email. These files can be extracted, read and edited to include the marker's comments (in red of course!). The edited file is then returned to the sender by email so turnround can be very fast.

In this case, using the redline markup option found in many wordprocessors allows the instructor to "mark" the assignments. However, everyone is tied to a common software package, i.e. one that can handle the redlines. Granted the turn-around time could be quick but I am skeptical of the overall advantages. Students may have to learn the software. They probably would need to become fairly adept at using it for attachments and such. While this is a valuable skill in itself, could the effort involved be significantly distracting from learning the rest of the course material? I'm not ruling out the use of paperless assignments. I'm just trying to look at practical aspects and to consider possible implementations in my classes. Looking forward to hearing more... -- Jeffrey L. Nauss, PhD Telephone: 513-556-0148 Dir. Molec. Model. Serv. Fax: 513-556-9239 Department of Chemistry e-mail: Jeffrey.Nauss@UC.Edu University of Cincinnati URL http://www.che.uc.edu/~nauss ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)