Yes, Virginia, There’s a Better Way to Grade by Linda Nilson.

Here’s her book: Specifications Grading.

Eric Mazur is using it to grade AP50: Project and Team-based Introductory to Physics at Harvard.

Felicia Tabing uses specifications grading at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Sal Khan of the Khan Academy describes a related idea, mastery learning, here:

In a followup to the last blog entry, through the work of Eric Mazur, I discovered a very interesting tool that he and his team have built: Perusall.

Persuall is a collaborative annotation tool for technical papers. It’s free.

You upload a PDF or a Web page and send the Persuall URL to your students.

Your students then read and electronically markup the article.

Perusall’s AI will then grade the annotations based on amount, distribution, and quality!

Furthermore, it will produce a confusion report, highlighting the three parts of the paper that have led to the most confusion together with the three annotations that convinced the AI of that conclusion.