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2:13pm on Friday, 27th May, 2022:
Anecdote
I loathe administration so much that I get it out of the way as soon as possible so it isn't hanging over my head. Merely by starting marking at 7:30am and not stopping until 6:30pm, I managed to work my way through the CE217 exam scripts and am now finished.
I prefer to have strong students in general, but when it comes to exams I confess that the weak students are best as they're easier to mark. They miss out entire questions; they put single-line answers in response to being asked to discuss something; they answer a completely different question to the one that was asked; they're 0 or 1, rather than "I'm sure I marked another paper four hours ago that had a similar line of argument, did I give it 4 or 5?".
My undergraduate exams are 5 questions in length, each one worth 20% of the total. When the papers are just that, paper, I batch-mark by question to ensure consistency. I can't really keep 70 files open at once to do the same for marking digital answers, though, so I do them 5 or 6 at a time. This is still varied enough that I don't know until I add the marks up at the end whether a student has done well or badly. Sometimes, I discover that a student has got 17+ for all their answers except the one they got 3 for. Sometimes, I discover that a student has got more for one answer than for the rest of the paper put together. It's quite strange how they can understand something in great depth and yet other things are beyond their comprehension.
The marks this year followed a linear distribution, rather than the normal (Gaussian) distribution or bimodal (overlapping Gaussian) distributions I've seen in the past. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but under the assumption that unless every student gets 70%+ it's a bad thing, my guess is it's a bad thing.
Amazingly, only one candidate mis-spelled "lose" this time. I didn't knock a mark off; they'd copied-and-pasted the text verbatim from a web site so didn't have any marks off which to be knocked.
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