Thursday, May 31, 2012

My Head is Spinning

I have spent the last two days in this room, marking assignments. About seven hours yesterday, and another ten today.
Trying to be consistent and fair is a difficult task, and it becomes more difficult as the hours go by.

Now I feel drained. It's an emotional process. I worry if very poor work is produced by a student who doesn't care, or if they will be devastated when they get their result. I am upset when a student has completely missed the point of the questions. Was it a language problem? Why didn't they ask for assistance or clarification? Why didn't they even discuss it with a friend and thus discover they were wrong? And then I get angry at students who don't seem to have put much effort into it, but ask that they be marked leniently.

I'm glad it is over. (Almost, anyway. I have one more to mark which has such major problems I don't know how to approach it.) Of course, once the students get their results, there will be requests for re-marking. Sometimes that is wishful thinking on their part, sometimes there are mistakes in the marking. We are all human.

1 comment:

kaiteM said...

It all sounds very tiring, i know i would worry endlessly but one shouldn't. As a Physio i would worry endlessly about my patients and whether they were improving or not but in the end i had to acknowledge that it is their life and their decisions whether or not to do as i had suggested. So it is with you, but i guess you know all that.