I’m done with the grading. Jeepers, I hate grading. We can’t give plus/minus modifications to final grades, so everyone ends up with a straight A,B,C,D, or F. (I give very few Ds, lots of Cs, a fair number of Bs, a few As and a few Fs.) Ranked in order of commonality, it’s C,B,A,F,D.
Particularly with the Bs and Cs, there are huge gaps. One student who gets a B just missed an A; another who gets a B barely avoided a C. If you wre to read their final papers, you would be bewildered as to how they could end up with the same grade. But with no plus/minus option, there you have it — a huge variation amongst folks with similar grades. That’s less true of the As, but for Bs and Cs, it’s a constant.
I had 322 finals or final papers to grade. No time for thoughtful comments, just a quick read-through, a grade, and then a brief period of wrestling over what final mark to give for the class. A few very kind students manage to earn the same grade on everything, and that makes the ultimate decision simple; there are not nearly enough of these consistent types to make my job easier.
I dream of a magic grading machine, operated by industrious chinchillas.
I suppose you could be lazy (like my teachers) and multiple-choice and scan-tron sheets.
Oh, I think about 100% scantron finals. I have dreams of doing all my grading in twenty minutes.
You have nerdy dreams :)
I’m a pretty nerdy guy in just about every imaginable respect, and that nerdiness extends into my sleeping reveries.
Haha–in which case, we’d need laws governing chinchilla labor.
Dude, I hear ya. Long gone are the days when I drowned in gruelling stacks of final papers, only to discover that 2-3 students always thought that they could get away with “downloading their workload” from the innernets …
Kudos to you for getting your grades in on time!
that’s why they invented automatic grading software LSA, which would do as accurate a job of grading the papers as you. Your students won’t detect a difference.