Grading, suite (Saturday, 2010 October 9)
Just finished grading my two classes of 3e. I timed the second one; 37 papers, about 1.5 hrs. The first one was 59 papers and it felt like forever.
In my second class I found four pairs of identical or nearly-identical papers. "Identical" in this context means that one student said that they had used "Microsoft Office Excelence", and the other said they had used "Misecroft Ofice Excelence". Two explained in identical words that the variable a was negative, and b was positive, therefore they were neither true nor false. You get the idea. Cameroonian students cheat a lot, but fortunately they are not very good at it. I believe this harkens back to an ongoing theme about critical thinking..?
Additionally, I decided to reuse the little tests for my two classes of 3e, and change it only slightly for 4e. This was intended to catch any effects I could expect to see from one class getting questions or answers from an earlier class. The results were: earlier 3e class average 1.90, later 3e class average 1.54. 4e classes average were 3.10, 3.59, 3.65. So it seems like the two 3e classes don’t communicate, but the 4es might. This might actually make a certain amount of sense, since my two 3e classes are on opposite sides of the quad, but 4es are all in a row. Whether this will motivate me to come up with "different enough" tests for 4e or not remains to be seen.
The papers I have yet to grade are making mysterious crumpling noises. I’m afraid to find out what is causing it, expecting it to be a spider that traps informatique the way others trap flies. For the time being I’m just going to assume it’s a nice, soothing, stress-induced auditory hallucination. Probably means bed would be a good idea..