Just survived grading a whole slew of essays over the past few days (as well as helping many students write those essays in the first place). As I posted on facebook this morning, I had 94 students * 1700 words each / (50,000 words per 175 pages) = 559 pages of a rather confusing and repetitive novel. Took a while, but it's done, so I'm finally able to do productive stuff like blog and listen to Kiss albums. Ha.
The whole grading dilly was more harrowing than I'm letting on, mainly because of the crap that led up to it. I helped a bunch of students between Tuesday and Thursday, the vast majority of whom were working on drafts and trying to put something coherent together. The vast majority of whom are great students who are really grateful and appropriately respectful and all of that. Unfortunately, it just takes one bad apple to spoil the whole damn bunch (thus spake Axl), and it only takes one or two students to wreck a day. I had one student come into my office unannounced at 11:50 - not my office hours - ten minutes before I needed to meet with Jason. She was contesting her essay grades - she had received a C on each of her first two assignments. I had only graded the first one - a month before at this point - but I still (stupidly) offered to take a look at it. She had botched her citation (no date, publisher or site of publication) and had failed to format her essay, so it was relatively easy to convince her of the validity of the first 1.5 points (out of ten) she had lost. Unfortunately, the other point she had lost was due to grammar mistakes. I started to read her essay with about two minutes before my meeting with Jason; I told her it would probably be a good idea to go over this at a later date when I had more time to read everything. She insisted on seeing one grammar mistake. It turns out that her paper had 21 grammar mistakes (in 800 words), not counting comma and capitalization errors. A lot of them were obvious, and it would have been easy if I had just pointed to one of her many sentence fragments or subject-verb disagreements to justify the deduction. Unfortunately, having not read the essay in a month, I went with the first one I saw, which was:
"This also includes the other spectrum of hypothyroidism, which is hyperthyroid."
So, to my eyes, it should be obvious that this is wrong; she meant "the other end of the spectrum." At the very least, for consistency she should have said "hyperthyroidism." And it should be "the spectrum of thyroid disorders" or something of that ilk. I tried to point out the error; she contested mightily. Loudly, and in-my-facedly. I tried to explain why it was strange to use "spectrum" this way; she replied with - I am not kidding - "it was a spectrum, like the heads and tails of a coin." Um, okay. After yelling at me for a few seconds, she closed with "So, you're just taking off points for bullshit that doesn't matter," and stormed out. Awesome. More awesome is that it is thoroughly recommended that we *document* cases like this, so I got to spend a bonus hour writing down all of her ridiculous grammar errors. Ugh.
Later that day, the prof of the class we're TAing innocently asked the class "if there are any questions or concerns about the class before I start lecture today." Unsurprisingly, a couple of people, one jerk in particular, took the opportunity to carp at length about the grades they had received. Mind you that the averages Katherine (the other TA) and I have come up with for the assignments this far have been in the 8 range, more or less ideal for a big, normally distributed course. Still, they loudly complained about the grading process, and then several of them came up to me after class demanding feedback. Which would have been great and all ... had they done it throughout the course of the semester and not all at the same time when we had a paper due that night. I actually managed to accommodate all of them - miraculously - and the majority figured out exactly why they deserved the grade they got if not worse. So that was good, I suppose; still, it meant we spent a lot of our days the last week getting chipped at by students. Not awesome.
In the background of all of this have been three blatant plagiarism cases that have required meetings and documentation and general idiocy. There's an exquisite kind of awkwardness that accompanies meeting with a student to whom you have nothing to say beyond "You cheated, we know it, here's the proof, what do you have to say for yourself?" At one of these meetings, the professor got detained at a meeting, so when we showed up at 1:30, we ended up sitting there for fifteen minutes in the hallway with the perpetrator. That's fun. Small talk: "So, read anything interesting in NATURE lately?" Ugh. Anyways, these are not fun, and the university academic dishonesty policy basically puts TAs / profs in a position of either slapping someone on the wrist (0 for the assignment), marring their transcript for life (giving them an "XE," which means "F for Academic Dishonesty) (which incidentally, if the student is a senior taking the course to fulfill a graduation requirement, has the side effect of delaying his graduation for at least a semester), or seriously wrecking their life (expulsion, etc.). My impulse is to throw these morons to the wolves, as these are not cases of "whoops, I forgot to cite that" but cases where words were changed in order to disguise the thievery. The classic "it would have been less work to just write the paper" situation. But then that slave morality sets in, and you don't want to substantially alter the course of someone's life based on something idiotic they do when they're 21. Tough situation. And an annoying, time-consuming one.
So enough of that; the TAing has caused an extraordinary amount of work lately and I am glad to have hit a lull in the semester for that course. We really have been going a little bit above and beyond - helping with essay editing, designing a lot of the assignments, generally putting out fires behind the scenes. I'd write myself a good rec, I think. More importantly, a few of the good students who have made honest, heartfelt efforts to improve themselves through the course have been making great strides. That's fun / endearing to see. I.e., it's not a lost cause, even if it may be missing.
Sorry for the self-indulgence; just thought I would write quickly about that as it has dominated the Nyetscape lately. As a reward for your reading, I will post something awesome next.
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