The merits of using digital pads in lectures were highlighted in a previous article, ‘An Experience Using Digital Pads for Teaching’ (CDTLink, Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 15). Recently, I have begun using the same digital pad from MGLogic for a different purpose: marking assignment scripts.

I ventured into electronic submission of assignments out of frustration. With the traditional paper submission, I had to arrange for someone to receive the assignments on my behalf. While I could simply instruct students to slip the assignments under my office door or into a locker with slots, I constantly faced the problem of students claiming to have submitted their assignments that I mysteriously did not receive.

When I started electronic submission of assignments in the form of Word documents, this solved the problem above but created another. To give students feedback on their work, I had to print out all the scripts—a costly and time-consuming endeavour. Then, I discovered that my digital pad had a packaged feature that allowed me to electronically write onto any Word document. The accompanying figure shows a page taken from a marked assignment. Electronic marking can present a tricky situation: what if marks are included and students tampered with them? This is no problem as Word has a file-saving feature that prevents editing using a password. You can find out more about this feature using Word’s help facility (i.e. try the phrase ‘password-protection’ under Index Search).