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It seems to me you have at least two issues here.  First, where are
the maps to be used, i.e., are they presented for screens only or
would they be used also in paper form?  If they're for screens
only and the computers are networked, I'd put something like Pegasus
mail on all of them and tell the students to MIME mail their finished
products to me (one added benefit is that you can for sure tell who sent
theirs late).  If they are for paper form in any way, I'm sorry to
say that I think you still have to look at a paper version of the
result.  I've been dealing with screen vs. paper output for 25 years
and three days (since the day I showed up in Dick Morrill's quant
class as a beginning Ph.D. student) and I still can't absolutely be
sure what the paper will look like even though I may have built whatever
there is on the screen.  The major reason is the gamma corrections which
are difficult to do and much of the work I do these days is in color.
The second major issue is the complexity of information on the map and
whether it looks cluttered, "loose" (my term for what it looks like
when there's too much white space and the map might fall apart any
second, or just about right.  Unfortunately, because of the differences
in screen resolution (ca. 72dpi) and paper resolution (much higher than
72dpi), I still can't tell that kind of thing from the screen alone.
 
As far as general grading criteria, one thing that I've found works is
to make a checklist of the things you want to be sure get considered
(something most of us do in our heads anyway) and send the students
back a marked up checklist with any additional comments at the end
(and their grade at the end as well).  You probably could set up some-
thing like this in a not-hairy database and even then export the grades
to something like Excel or 1-2-3 to calculate the final grades for the
term.  Of course, this has the distinct drawback that the students
would be able to read and comprehend your comments since nobody's
handwriting is involved......  ;-)
 
Unfortunately, I think this answer neither shortens your task nor
makes it easier.  It simply makes it different.
 
HTH.
 
virginia