This is what a stack of 150+ seven page exams looks like.1
After the students have fled, I’ll put on my coffeehouse jazz playlist on my iPod2 and dig in.3 While grading papers can sometimes be oddly therapeutic, I’d rather not do any more than absolutely necessary.
I grade these things page-by-page, so as to maintain some consistency in how I grant partial credit between classes. I also usually start grading from the last page of each exam — because the latter half of each test contains the open-ended free response questions that take wayyy long to grade — and move my way to the front of each exam — which house the much quicker multiple choice questions.4
I’d estimate that it takes about three solid hours to work through 3 classes worth,5 so I try to start while the next class period is taking the exam. I’ve learned the hard way: every minute that you can be efficient with counts.
This is test #9 of the year,6 and for the first time this campaign, after grading a particularly painful free-response question7 question one hundred fifty-some times, I thought to myself,
Thank God I don’t EVER have to grade this question again…8
Only four more lessons until the start of the “postseason”. Time has wings, indeed…
- Writing that reminds me of the line early in Jerry Maguire, where Tom Cruise narrates the kid baseball player hitting a deep ball with: “Check out what pure looks like.” Well… this would be the opposite. I can also picture a student reading this, thinking, “Maybe you should just give us shorter exams!” :p [↩]
- silver 80GB Classic… vintage by today’s standards. [↩]
- If you’re curious, “The Prestige” is playing in the background.” [↩]
- If you’re reading this thinking, “You give multiple choice questions!? How easy!!!” then I have a couple of hundred statistics students ready to throw daggers in your general direction. [↩]
- so one A-day or B-day’s worth [↩]
- and only one more to go! [↩]
- the one about the DC Schools cheating scandal from a few years back [↩]
- well, until next year. [↩]