Increase Your Department’s Research Throughput

Throughout my career, I’ve been to more than 100 different universities to visit with science-teaching faculty and give department presentations. I hear a common refrain from department heads and faculty: Lab TAs spend too much time grading lab reports instead of doing research. 

I initially saw the benefits of lab report auto-grading first-hand when I was a graduate student, and later lecturer, at the University of Texas at Austin. Easing the grading burden of TAs to improve research output was a stated goal of the department, so UT built their own auto-grading system for the quantitative elements of general chemistry lab reports (in Fortran, so I’ve just dated myself). 

In 2018, my team and I founded Catalyst Education. Decreasing grading time was one of the main goals as we designed and built Labflow, our teaching and learning platform for lab courses. Labflow’s unique time- and cost-saving benefits are the result of innovative grading workflow and automatic grading of lab reports.

A fall 2021 survey of TAs at two large research institutions showed that with Labflow, grading takes up only 3–4 hours each week, compared with the expectation of 10 hours—a time savings of 60% or more.In that same survey, 93% of experienced TAs agreed that Labflow saved them time.

By getting back almost a full day of time each week, graduate students are able to do more research, publish more papers, and progress more quickly toward earning their Ph.D.—and as a result, increase the department’s research throughput. 

TAs love Labflow because it affords them more time to focus on their research and increases progress toward their degree. “I think that Labflow would make a great impact in making me graduate sooner,” shared TA Kylin Emhoff from Cleveland State University, who went from spending 10 hours on grading to just 2–3 hours. Watch the video to hear her interview. 

You can find more details about our findings in our new TA grading white paper. 

To see how Labflow accomplishes these time savings, schedule a demo with one of our scientists. Please be sure to invite your lab coordinator so you get the most out of our demo.