The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
12:13pm on Thursday, 29th August, 2024:
Anecdote
I'm in the throes of marking again.
Two resit assignments occupied Tuesday.
Three resit exams occupied Wednesday.
A late version of one of the resit assignments I marked on Tuesday occupied some of this morning. The rest was occupied by reading one of the six MSc dissertations I have to read by next week (with two more late submissions to come), along with organising the project demonstrations and orals for my own supervisees.
We actually have a two-week window in which to hold the PDOs, but I'm away at a conference for the second half of the second week, so that rather limits my options. Other lecturers are doubtless away for parts of next week. We have so many supervisees and second assessments to do that timetable clashes are inevitable and have to be worked around. Also, because the supervisor and supervisee have to be present in the same room when the PDO takes place (for visa reasons), there are further clashes for those supervisors who share offices with other supervisors, which is most of them.
It''s always a mess organising these PDOs. It didn't used to be, when we had a small enough number of MSc students that they could present their work in a meeting room and when supervisers were paired up for assessments so they could do all of them consecutively in blocks. Nowadays, meeting rooms are at a premium and assessors are allocated pretty well at random. We're getting dissertations to read that are well outside our areas of expertise. I'm having to assess work on subjects such as dialogue analysis and diabetes recognition; I managed to get out of one on cognitive capacity by swapping with a games one that I should have been second assessor for since October if the allocations had been made somewhat less randomly.
Not a good time to be asked to referee a journal paper, then.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).