I have just finished marking a batch of 48 papers (1,200 words on average each), a task which has taken much of my time this week, the weekend included. I wish actually I could say I’m done, for the downside of all that time and effort is that the poorest 23 of these papers will bounce back for reassessment according to the rules my university follows. So much for continuous assessment… Deep, deep sigh…
As I marked the essays the image that came to my mind all the time was that of communicating vases. These are, as you know, vases holding the same amount of liquid connected in a way that when one is depleted the other is filled. In ideal stasis both vases hold the same amount of liquid. The image might not apply to this case but the impression I’ve had through the many hours of marking is that my vase would fill and even overflow in direct relation to the student in question making very little effort to write his/her paper. A well-written paper of the kind I have marked may take 5 minutes to read (balanced vases), a bad one roughly 20 minutes (unbalanced vases). Why? When I mean mark, I really mean edit. With a well-written paper I can focus on simply reading; in the bad ones the ‘noise’ that poor writing and presentation make is so ‘loud’ that I can’t simply read. Ergo: the less a student works at polishing his/her paper, the more I have to work at reading/editing it. This is why marking is to tedious, time-consuming and, what is worse, brain-weakening…
All teachers hate marking and, believe it or not, it is one of the most exhausting teaching-related activities. This is because, as I was saying, we don’t limit ourselves to reading and tend, rather, to correct down to the last comma whatever is wrong in each exercise (well, I do, I can’t help it!). The brain-power needed to think of alternatives to errors and awkward phrasing is enormous, so big that after marking a few bad papers I can’t simply go on, which is why, of course, marking takes so long. I wish I could simply read the papers but we’re told students need feedback and this encompasses anything from adding missing an –s to third person singular present-tense verbs to explaining why the paper’s overall argumentation is not solid enough. I mark now all papers on my computer as I find writing comments on hard (printed) copies very untidy and also because I think I work faster. I realise, through, that I tend to make many, many comments and I guess that my students possibly hate to see so many blurbs added to their essays… It’s in good faith, believe me.
The theory of our new-style Bologna degrees is that the communicating vases can be balanced by offering in advance detailed guidelines as to what is required of the student’s exercises. How come, then, that two thirds of my marking effort have gone to asking students to check and re-edit their papers according to the guidelines? Big mystery…