Grading Jail
Well, I had really intended to update this more regularly, but that hasn't happened and now the semester is almost over. Next week is our last week of classes, then finals are the week after that. We are on a pretty late calendar this year with grades due on December 22nd!
Between now and then, I will be spending a good amount of my time grading. Grading papers. Grading exams. Grading projects. I assign written assignments in all of my classes, because I think it is useful and valuable, but this time of the semester I often start second-guessing my wisdom about this when I have 80-some-odd papers, 16 research papers, 9 project reports, (and a partridge in a pear tree) to grade- not to mention hazard journals, labs, and exams. My friends on Facebook are used to me complaining about grading and often ask why my teaching assistant doesn't do it. Well, I only have a TA for one class and his/her job is to grade labs and exams. I have usually graded any papers myself. It's not that I don't trust my TAs, but given the wide range of topics that students pick, it's difficult to give specific direction on grading those- even with a rubric- and I have years of experience grading different incarnations of that assignment. In my other classes, I have no TA, so it's all up to me anyway.
One thing that makes my work easier is that I have switched to almost exclusively digital grading. I receive very few assignments on paper any more. For some assignments, I simply have them upload their work through Blackboard (our online software) and others I use TurnItIn- which checks for plagiarism, but also has an inbuilt grading tool. I can create rubrics in the program, make comments on the papers, etc. and the students can see this without me having to download, then upload the papers. But, there's no getting around it- grading is time consuming.
On that note, I should really get back to the grading task I had planned for this afternoon, before I get all the papers and projects later this week and next. I'll try to post again in the next few weeks!
Between now and then, I will be spending a good amount of my time grading. Grading papers. Grading exams. Grading projects. I assign written assignments in all of my classes, because I think it is useful and valuable, but this time of the semester I often start second-guessing my wisdom about this when I have 80-some-odd papers, 16 research papers, 9 project reports, (and a partridge in a pear tree) to grade- not to mention hazard journals, labs, and exams. My friends on Facebook are used to me complaining about grading and often ask why my teaching assistant doesn't do it. Well, I only have a TA for one class and his/her job is to grade labs and exams. I have usually graded any papers myself. It's not that I don't trust my TAs, but given the wide range of topics that students pick, it's difficult to give specific direction on grading those- even with a rubric- and I have years of experience grading different incarnations of that assignment. In my other classes, I have no TA, so it's all up to me anyway.
One thing that makes my work easier is that I have switched to almost exclusively digital grading. I receive very few assignments on paper any more. For some assignments, I simply have them upload their work through Blackboard (our online software) and others I use TurnItIn- which checks for plagiarism, but also has an inbuilt grading tool. I can create rubrics in the program, make comments on the papers, etc. and the students can see this without me having to download, then upload the papers. But, there's no getting around it- grading is time consuming.
On that note, I should really get back to the grading task I had planned for this afternoon, before I get all the papers and projects later this week and next. I'll try to post again in the next few weeks!
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