{"id":1297,"date":"2017-01-19T18:30:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T16:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1297"},"modified":"2017-01-19T18:30:34","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T16:30:34","slug":"the-boomerang-effect-why-marking-is-so-exhausting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2017\/01\/19\/the-boomerang-effect-why-marking-is-so-exhausting\/","title":{"rendered":"THE BOOMERANG EFFECT: WHY MARKING IS SO EXHAUSTING<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m writing this after a serious bout of marking post-grad essays today, lasting for about seven hours (with email messages in between). This means that I\u2019m going probably to sound quite incoherent, as I\u2019m exhausted. At the same time, I feel like letting off some steam by writing and, besides, this post is a bit overdue. So here we go.<\/p>\n

April is not the cruellest month, as the poet claimed. The cruellest months are January and June, the time when piles of exercises to mark and grade replace classroom teaching. My workload is relatively small but even so it takes up long stretches of these two months because I\u2019m the kind of teacher that corrects everything that can be possibly wrong, down to the last comma. I blame this on some kind of uncontrolled compulsion or TOC. Also, on my habit of marking all I can on the computer, as I hate carrying home printed work. Handwritten exams are also a complete nightmare to me, with all that undecipherable text and my increasing inability to write a legible hand myself\u2026 <\/p>\n

Computer marking, as I was saying, is preferable to me but, then, I tend to pepper students\u2019 exercises not only with corrections and revisions but also with lots of notes. I can\u2019t help it\u2026 I\u2019ve never been the kind of teacher that takes a quick look and emits a verdict for, among other things, I believe that notes and corrections help me very much when students request a review. Nothing more embarrassing than not knowing at first sight why you have failed someone\u2026 Oops! <\/p>\n

Although it might seem that marking exercises is a repetitive exercise with no great novelties from one semester to the next one, I find that each semester is coloured by a particular note. Or notes. So let me share with you what\u2019s on my mind, and see if we\u2019re perceiving the same peculiarities and problems. I\u2019m marking work by undergrad and postgrad students and this will help me to cover a lot of ground at once.<\/p>\n

First my undergrad class, Victorian Literature, a second-year course. This semester the pattern for the final marks is as follows: a very small number of both A and D students, and a large number of C and C+ students. Hardly any Bs, much less B+. This is the same in our three groups. <\/p>\n

Now let me add that the main task in this course is the writing of a basic academic paper, the first ever produced by our students. This amounts to 50% of the final mark (10% the proposal, 40% the paper itself). Since students are performing better in the exams, many more than we wished for have managed to pass the subject despite failing the paper. In my class, 30% of students have failed the paper, which means that they have not acquired fundamental skills despite passing. Raising the value of the paper to 60% seems extreme, but perhaps we should consider this\u2026<\/p>\n

Both in the case of the exams and of the paper, most students could have earned a B or B+ grade, if only they had planned their semester better and had paid attention to exercise instructions. And here\u2019s the keynote for this semester: although I am convinced that all my\/our students are bright enough they often trip themselves up by failing to check and\/or understand what is required of them. <\/p>\n

In the case of the first exam (which they were allowed to take home and prepare in advance) 25% failed to see that the questions referred to an article they were supposed to take into account. They failed simply because they didn\u2019t even mention the article \u2013 I wonder why, as this was the whole point of allowing them to prepare the exam with plenty of time.<\/p>\n

The case of the paper is even more severe… We have developed so far the following documentation:
\na) a guide to writing abstracts
\nb) a guide to writing basic academic papers
\nc) a template to submit the paper proposal
\nd) a template to submit the paper itself
\ne) a sample paper
\nI\u2019m possibly forgetting some item. To my horror and consternation, the student delegate for the second year complained in our last Department meeting that students do not receive enough information about what they need to do. I\u2019m really baffled\u2026<\/p>\n

Among the errors due to this constant lack of attention to instructions, we found that even though we provide templates for the paper proposal and for the paper to ease edition, students systematically alter the templates or neglect the instructions. I have no idea how and why page numbers have disappeared, Times New Roman has become Calibri, nor why abstracts are missing the narrower lateral margins. <\/p>\n

Even worse: my students claim to know, of course, that book and journal titles should be in italics \u2013 why then do I waste so much time correcting this? Worse even: we had to grade with a 0 paper proposals which neglected to include passages from the primary and the secondary sources, although that was clearly indicated in the template. The instruction to use at least quotations from three secondary sources in the paper is also a source of constant wrangling with my students: for mysterious reasons, many use only two. Or forget altogether to include any, even though this is one of the major skills the exercise teaches.<\/p>\n

There are moments when I feel that there is some kind of secret tug-of-war going on: you say tomato, I say potato\u2026 something of that sort. Believe me: after adding italics to 45 papers, any teacher would be out of sorts. Hence my Harry Potter<\/em>-style howlers, as I call the notes I write in capital letters (BOOK TITLES MUST BE IN ITALICS \u2013THIS IS BASIC!!!) <\/p>\n

Postrad exercises present their own challenges and can be even more frustrating. After all, poor things, my second-year students are new to argumentative academic papers. Yet, what is the excuse of the postgrad students to make very similar mistakes? This year, I have started using templates with them, to no avail \u2013 the italics are missing, the abstract awry, the bibliography incorrectly edited\u2026 And a classic: the quotations are thrown into the text with no connective tissue linking them to the main text, whether this is a colon or a phrase (\u2018As Smith claims\u2026\u2019).<\/p>\n

What is exhausting in the case of the MA is not so much marking the papers but getting them under way. I never allow students to hand in a paper without a previous proposal, consisting of provisional title, abstract and bibliography, and this is where many postgrad students still face many difficulties. If they come from our Department, at least we can argue that, for shame, they know how to write an abstract since\u2026 Victorian Literature. But if they come from other Departments or even schools, that might not always be the case. This means that I find myself teaching in the MA academic techniques I\u2019m also teaching to undergrads\u2026<\/p>\n

The main problem in all cases, whether under- or postgrad, which conditions in its turn the success of the paper is the student\u2019s difficulties to formulate a thesis statement. In the Spanish tradition, the argumentative essay is a rarity and academic works tends to be rather descriptive, often covering all possible ground in relation to a text, rather than focus on a central idea. This means that my students are often perplexed by my insistence that they must have a thesis. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an interesting example: a student who wishes to write her paper about Walter White, the villain in Breaking Bad<\/em>, submitted recently an abstract beset by the typical problem: it announced her intention to study this TV series but not her thesis. She came for a tutorial and, as it often happens, the moment she answered my question (why are you interested in White?), the complete abstract, thesis included, materialized. Much to her surprise. In contrast, the papers I have failed today suffered from this central problem: they lacked a thesis, and without a main argument you cannot write an argumentative essay.<\/p>\n

So, why is marking so exhausting and grading so frustrating? Easy: this is when you realize that students are not paying enough attention to your instructions. If this because they don\u2019t understand them, then the question that comes to my mind is \u2018why didn\u2019t you check with me?\u2019. If this because they don\u2019t care, then the question is \u2018why are you wasting my precious time?\u2019 Sharp and sour.<\/p>\n

When you throw a boomerang with the right skill, it comes back to you. I feel that teaching is like throwing a boomerang. In the best cases, it returns to you loaded with wonderful gifts (I awarded a girl student a 10 because I found myself in dialogue with her paper, not just marking it). In the worst cases, the returned boomerang hits you smack in the face\u2013yes, it feels like an insult, like being shouted \u00abI don\u2019t care and you won\u2019t make me care!\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end the message to students who will not follow instructions because they do not care is that they only hurt themselves. I will never understand why, given the chance to do well for your own benefit, people choose to underperform willingly. A complete mystery to me\u2026<\/p>\n

I publish a new post every Tuesday. Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just be warned that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be online. Follow the blog updates on Twitter: @SaraMartinUAB and download the yearly volumes from http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328. See also: http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m writing this after a serious bout of marking post-grad essays today, lasting for about seven hours (with email messages in between). This means that I\u2019m going probably to sound quite incoherent, as I\u2019m exhausted. At the same time, I feel like letting off some steam by writing and, besides, this post is a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tools-and-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}