Thursday, April 03, 2008

I am not alone!

Hi, my name is Angus and I'm a grade-avoider. I give exams right before spring break so that I can have "all week to get them done" but generally I'm up late on Monday of the next week feverishly grading to get them done by when I've promised them back to the class. While other people look at the new academic calendars for vacation days, I look for the line saying, "final grades due by:" If anything will make me stop professoring, it will be grading.

Mrs. Angus on the other hand is a grading machine. She'll give exams in both her classes and have the first set graded by the time the second class finishes taking their test.

Well I learned this week that I am a member of a big club according to Insider Higher Ed. Late grades are apparently a chronic problem and some schools are taking extreme measures to deal with them. The article is worth a read and so are all the comments. The comments will give you non-academics a feeling for why faculty meetings generally take so long and accomplish so little.

If you think the proposed remedies for late grades seem extreme, at the school where Mrs. Angus and I taught in Mexico, professors were required to go to an office before each of their classes and sign a form certifying that they were actually holding their class that day! I am not making this up. It irritated me to no end, so I wouldn't do it and the bureaucrats decided they weren't going to pay me, so I told them that would cause me to stop teaching the course. This real life "Mexican standoff" was resolved by me agreeing to sign about 20 backdated certification forms.

I really enjoy teaching but I despise grading.

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