A month or so ago, I marked and graded some philosophy papers. Today, I am at it again, marking their examination papers now. The marking is draining my brain, and I am calling it a day. Due to various factors, admin related, the marks need to be in at a certain date. Now, the marking stint has begun.
It is funny how when you mark all of the same questions at once how you can pick up how similar some answers are and how similar mistakes are. I know for a fact that people exchanged notes with each other; that is, they did not bother to read the primary sources, nor my notes, nor did they come to class to make their own notes. Relying on other students' notes can be helpful, but when that student did not understand the work clearly, disaster strikes.
For example, one of the questions could potentially have read ambiguous, but if they bothered to come to the class this ambiguity would not have emerged.
And two or three students fell into that trap.
But this was not a trap that I set up intentionally. Not at all. It was merely the phrasings being closely related. Double task, double maneuver, double notion. These doubles sound similar, but they have vastly different applications and contexts.
And they did not spot this.
A couple of reasons might be given for this:
- they might have "spot studied", meaning they only studied a certain portion and had to stick with it otherwise they did not have anything to write down, and as every student knows, write down anything, never leave a question unanswered, or
- they did not study and merely remembered what they might have heard in class, or
- they studied the wrong one by not being in class and not being familiar with the other doubles, and so on.
I am constantly trying to put myself in the shoes of these students, and after having a discussion with a fellow colleague yesterday, I find it all the more difficult.
We as young lecturers, he said, sometimes forget that the students, like us, who climb the ranks and become teacher's assistants and so on, are minorities in the academy. Most of the students are not studying your module because they have a passion for the field and want to become professors. No, that is not the case. And I sometimes forget this fact.
So to some degree, you can place yourself in the shoes of a student, but not always. Because you, the teacher's assistant, or the new lecturer, is not like these students, you are merely like the 1% that climbs the ranks.
And this places the lecturer in a precarious position: how difficult can you make a subject and its assessment? You cannot lower the standard to fit the shoes of those who do not want to do the module, yet, you cannot elevate the standard so much that no one but the 1% will pass (given that some of the 1% took your module!).
And so I am finding myself marking these papers feeling that I set a paper right in the middle. Some did really badly, some did okay, and some did really well. The ideal is to get a normal distribution on the marks, with some flunking, with some doing really well, but with the biggest group dwelling in the middle, somewhere between 55%-65%. That is the goal, at least. Because you know that some students will just disregard the module, you know that some will excel, and you know the majority is just at university to get their degree,
In any case, if you read the whole spiel, I hope you gained some insight into the mind of a strange philosopher. I hope you enjoyed it as well.
All of the writing is my own, and the photographs are my own as well, taken with my iPhone.
Happy reading, and stay well.