wsean comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, January 2015, chapter 103 - Less Wrong Discussion
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A spell to grade tests is probably not an old spell that's been around forever since no one else seems to use it, but QQ may have invented it for this purpose.
Either way, it's existence is a further hint to the nature of magic in the world of HPMOR. It involves some pretty sophiscated natural languge processing. The fact that magic can do natural language processing is hinted as significant in chapter 6 while Harry is studying the retrieval charm and trying diffent phrases that point to "bag of gold". If we knew how magic could read a test and predict what the ministry would give it, we would know a lot more about magic.
Note, we can reject the hypothesis the the spell just doing something simple like implements a big data style algorithm with 800 years of prior tests and grades as its training corpus because QQs students are going to be writing answers that are very different from the training set and so the model wouldn't have good predictive power
Quirrell is joking. He doesn't care about the results of the ministry-mandated test, as he already knew what grades his students had earned from him regardless.
At the beginning Quirrell had said any tests he gave would grade itself in real time so students could help each other for bonus points. So Some method of achieving a similar effect exists.
Assuming Quirrell did have the final grades already calculated before the test, did Quirrell know ahead of time how the students would score on the test and have the final grades reflect that, or did he use the grades up to that point in total indifference to the test scores?
ETA: Oops, I seem to have completely missed this discussion when I posted this here. My bad.