A paper published in 2011 show the results of the events that unfolded when a professor and his colleagues followed eight judges for ten months as they ruled on over 1,000 applications made by prisoners to parole boards. The plaintiffs were asking either to be allowed out on parole or to have the conditions of their incarceration changed. The team found that, at the start of the day, the judges granted around two-thirds of the applications before them. As the hours passed, that number fell sharply, eventually reaching zero. But clemency returned after each of two daily breaks, during which the judges retired for food. The approval rate shot back up to near its original value, before falling again as the day wore on. The researchers further found that the rulings didn't tend to be affected by the severity of the crime, the prison time served or the prisoner's gender or ethnicity.

When people are making a large number of decisions in a row, they look for ways to simplify the process when they get mentally tired, and the easiest decision to make is in favor of maintaining the status quo. It is a

commonly known fact that decision making is mentally taxing and that, if forced to keep deciding things, people get tired and start looking for easy answers.

The researchers said they suspect people would also seek ways to simplify matters when facing a series of decisions in legislative, medical, financial and other situations. Other fields too are familiar with human imperfectability, and take steps to ameliorate it. Pilots, for instance, are given checklists to follow, partly in order to combat the effects of fatigue. Lorry drivers in the European Union are not allowed to drive for more than four and a half hours without taking a break.

Eduleaf is trying to take similar steps to help simplify the process of grading for instructors all over the world, thereby making the process more easy and error and bias free. By breaking down the process of grading into marking individual questions of all students as a group we ensure that the instructor follows roughly the same thought process while grading the entire question. This addresses the complaints by many students that their

peers who had been graded either at the start of the process or at the end could be seen to either have extremely high or low scores. Moreover, instructors often claim that they are less likely to favorably grade a student who tends to “ramble” in his answers. By asking for short answers that fit within a limited area, Eduleaf dramatically cuts down the irrelevant text that a student tends to fill his answer with. This further helps the instructor grade impartially since he now has to compare only a short answer to his marking scheme. By making the questions as objective as possible Eduleaf also assures that there is less room for error on the grader's behalf due to any extraneous reasons such as exhaustion, prior mood, etc.

We strongly suggest that any teacher who loves teaching but hates the process of grading give Eduleaf a try! We assure you that you will never go back to grading long essay questions by hand again.