Grading

Another sign that the semester is at a close: I'm swimming in a pile of ungraded exams and emails demanding final grades. I'm getting to it, I'm getting to it.

This is arguably the least glamorous aspect of being a TA. Grading is a lot harder than it seems at first. For example, I found out yesteray as I was picking up the final exam sample set up that SOMEONE had accidentally switched 2 of the rock specimens people were supposed to identify. That means that people who knew what they were doing would still get questions wrong because they were looking at the wrong specimen. I have no idea when this happened or who used that set up, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to handle this. It probably means I'll have to omit those questions for that section and calculate the grade out of a different number of points. It's a situation where I don't want to penalize people for someone else's mistake, but at the same time I don't want to give credit to people who were clueless.

Not to mention, the illegible, incomprehensible gibberish that some people write. Oops, I guess I just mentioned it... I need a cryptographer. That's a person who deciphers codes.

I'm a third of the way through grading. This afternoon, once everything is in my grade book, I'll be free.

Free to work on something else at any rate.