Open-ended assignments -- such as lab reports and semester-long projects --
provide data science and statistics students with opportunities for developing
communication, critical thinking, and creativity skills. However, providing
grades and qualitative feedback to open-ended assignments can be very time
consuming and difficult to do consistently across students. In this paper, we
discuss the steps of a typical grading workflow and highlight which steps can
be automated in an approach that we define as an automated grading workflow. We
illustrate how gradetools, a new R package, implements this approach within
RStudio to facilitate efficient and consistent grading while providing
individualized feedback. We hope that this work will help the community of data
science and statistics educators use gradetools as their grading workflow
assistant or develop their own tools for assisting their grading workflow.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figure