(from someecards.com)

Over the years, SAGrader has been used a lot in Sociology courses. As a result we’ve gathered an impressive collection of classroom-tested essay assignments for Intro, Social Psychology, Social Deviance and Research Methods. Now we’re offering these ready-to-use assignments to your Sociology class!

It’s an easy way to inject some robust assignments into your curriculum. And since they’re already setup in SAGrader, you won’t have to grade them. We’ve got over 20 assignments to choose from. Use as many as you want for only $19 a student.

You can learn more about it and get access to all the assignments for free on our website.

Just the other day, I had someone on a listserv ask whether they should send their interviews to a transcription service to be transcribe. You may not know this, but transcription is a service offered by our company. Because of that, I thought I would respond to the questions with some of my experiences. I’ve posted my response here for any researchers who are considering the same question.

This is a great question, and in my mind it seems to come down to three things: what time do you have to sacrifice, how much money are you willing to spend, and in what way would you like to get to know your data intimately. As an employee of a company that does transcriptions, I’ve gotten to see researchers struggle through this decision in the past, so I will pass on some of what I have learned.

Read the rest of this entry »

Crunch Time!!! You’ve finished your last finals, graduated from lawschool and then sacrificed your summer to study for the Bar. Don’t let your hard work go to waste. Bar Essay Prep allows you to test your knowledge on 30 actual bar exam essays used in 2006 & 2007 bar exams so you can KNOW you are ready for the Bar.

Making and reviewing outlines is the best way to synthesize your legal knowledge in preparation for the bar exam. However, too often students outline, review, and re-outline without testing to ensure they don’t have any significant gaps or misunderstandings of the law. The best way to test your knowledge is to actually test your knowledge, and Bar Essay Prep allows you to submit up to three answers per essay and receive an almost instant grade and feedback of what legal points you covered and those that you missed. You can try it for free at Baressayprep.com.

No matter how much you have studied up to this point, it is time to put on the finishing touches and gain the confidence you need to pass the bar. Good luck!

SAGrader ( www.sagrader.com ) , our automated essay grading service, has seen a lot of changes this summer. We’ve improved the interface, made some changes to some features, and added an array of new functionality. For an example of something we’ve changed, please look at the section view in your account (paid or demo).

In order to get some information on how users view the changes and new features that we have released, we are running a beta test of the newest version of SAGrader, version 3.0.
Beta test enrollment will run from July 14th through August 1st. Unfortunately, we can only accept a limited number of beta testers, so apply early to receive first consideration.

For the beta test we are offering instructors the ability to have three essays programmed into SAGrader for free, and then have up to 150 students in a class submit to their personalized assignments. This will give instructors the ability to offer the SAGrader learning environment to their students without requiring their students to pay anything (as always, instructors pay nothing).

Why would we do something as crazy as offer such a powerful program as SAGrader for free? In short, we need data. We want to know what people think about our new features, and how we can improve in the future. Also, we want to know a few things about SAGrader instructors. We want to know how their experience goes, and how their students’ experiences go. In order to do that, we are asking that instructors and students fill out a couple surveys.

We hope to be able to use this opportunity to dramatically improve SAGrader, and build an even more powerful learning system. Go to www.sagrader.com/beta for more information on the beta. Find the solicitation after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Web application and desktop application development varies in a few ways. One of these ways is product release cycles. Adobe Photoshop, which has been around since 1988, has shipped only 14 times in the last 20 years. In contrast we’ve “shipped” or pushed code onto the web 15 times in the last 20 weeks.

This is due partly to the fact that we are a much smaller company and are much more agile in our development. But, this is also due to the fact that traditional development cycles emphasize phases. First there is design, then development, then bug fixes and finally the product is prepared for release, printed on discs, and shipped out to retailers. This last step is not a trivial one, once a product is shipped to retailers it isn’t feasible to add a new feature or bug fix and give it to all customers without shipping again.

With a web application it is possible to develop continuously. The traditional development cycles still exist, but on a per feature basis instead of per product. We don’t have to worry about shipping our product to retailers, we can give it directly to the customer through the web, and we can constantly update it.

There is one major drawback to continuous development however, the lack of parties, specifically release parties. I imagine it is not difficult to drum up excitement for a release when the last year of your life was dedicated to it. But how do you get people excited for version 3.0 when you just pushed version 2.99?

Answer: You have cake. And so, as we internally wrap up version 3.0 of SAGrader we celebrate with cake.

On the last leg of my bike route back home from work, I face a not-too-steep-but-very-lengthy hill. Last night, as I was huffing and puffing up the incline, a question slowly formed in my mind: Doesn’t this bike have 21 speeds?

The truth is, until yesterday, I’d never bothered to use the left shift lever, effectively taking the front derailleur entirely out of the equation and using only a third of my bike’s gears. Most of the time, when the road slopes only slightly, the middle seven gears are sufficient. So, that’s all I used. Even when I encountered more abrupt hills, I apparently decided it wasn’t worth twisting my left hand a quarter of an inch to switch the font gears.

It’s unfortunate because, as I discovered last night, it is waaay easier to climb a hill when you downshift to 4th gear. It got me thinking about other tools I’m not using to their full potential. Are there aspects of my work that can be made easier simply by more completely utilizing the tools available to me?

The first thing I thought of is the way I design logos. In the past year, I’ve tried to freshen up the logos for our products and created a new logo for the company. I do all my graphics work in Gimp, which produces bitmap images. Normally fine, but lately I’ve been thinking that our logos should be vector images. Logos tend to be used all over the place in a variety of placements, and it would be ideal if we could scale them up or down quickly without losing quality. Currently, it can be tedious creating a newly-sized logo, and we can pretty much only make them smaller without losing quality.

I’ve got a great open source vector graphics editor on my machine; just haven’t bothered to learn it yet. Maybe it’s about time I learned how to use all 21 speeds.