Grading assignments seems to be every teacher's bane. I really like teaching. I think it's a lot of fun, and I like to think that my students enjoy class, too. Teaching means that, whether my research goes well or poorly, I still accomplish something every semester - a bunch of people walk away from my class knowing new stuff. Teaching is really rewarding and mentally stimulating for the teacher as well - we have to learn all the intricacies of a domain so that, no matter the question, we can field it.
Unfortunately, people want to receive grades. And despite claims of grade inflation, that means that I can't just give everyone an A. Instead, I must assess their understanding of the material and their ability to utilize that knowledge to solve problems and create systems. Which means I have to grade them. Dammit.
Grading really, really sucks. I truly do see the appeal of Scantron. But, since I am teaching at the university level, fill in the bubbles just doesn't cut it as a learning experience or as an evaluation tool. So I have to assign interesting assignments. Not always - the first one or two assignments in any given class are usually of the "do you have a pulse?" variety - but for the most part, I feel that I am letting students down if their assignment is either uninteresting or easy. Unfortunately, interesting and tricky assignments are usually a total p.i.t.a. to grade.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Recently, I told students to write a program that would analyze a text and then print out all the proper nouns in said text and a count of how many times each noun appeared. I told them that I didn't expect perfection, but that I would be testing their scripts on Moby Dick, among others, and if they didn't at least find Ishmael. their program wouldn't cut it. Since computers can't understand text very well, their programs are necessarily going to be a little dicey, so I told them to do their best.
That, it seems to me, is a very interesting problem. Recognizing parts of speech is very much a non-trivial thing. Not only that, but it's also nice because it is easy to write a program that does a mediocre job, and then it is pregressively more and more difficult to refine that progam into a superb one. It's also horrible to grade.
So now I have 17 programs that analyze text and print out proper noun frequencies. Some of them take a long time to run. Some of them suck ass. Others are elegant little masterpieces. So I have a general idea of which ones are pretty to look at and which ones work well. Unfortunately, "You did okay" is not a grade. So I need to figure out whether "You did okay" means they get 50%, 75% or 100% but no extra credit. Not only that, but I have to figure out whether or not student A's "Okay" is better than student B's "okay" so that A can get a 73% compared to B's 79%. And now my job, which I have been putting off for over a week, is to assign little numbers to each program that indicate, to two digits of precision, how good their program is.
A cursory glance through their code has not found any cheating - which is nice, as discovering an instance of cheating means that I get really pissed off and have to stop grading for 24 hours - but these numbers that I assign aren't just data in a vacuum, they impact the self esteem and progress of the people to whom I give them. Every student that I tell "your program is teh sux0r" to will go away feeling shittier because of it. Everyone in the class worked hard on their homework (I think), which means that they are now emotionally invested in how good I think it is. So telling a student "you get a 40%" doesn't just affect their grade and how they feel about the class, but it also affects their future performance.1 Self esteem therapists aside, a person who is told that their work is lame generally feels bad afterwards. And nobody does good work when they feel bad. So I have this heisenbergian dilemma - tell a student they are doing poorly so that I can assure future poor performance, or lie. And since I'm not going to lie, I have to steel myself every time I send out grades.
Most professors hate grading, so it is famously farmed off on grad students and/or teaching assistants. Unfortunately, this also separates the teacher from student feedback, because every missed answer or uncaught bug is another clue to the teacher that a particular area was not covered well enough. This means that professors tend to become insulated from criticism, especially once they get tenure and are no longer even required to give out student reviews at the end of the term.
As for me, I hate grading, but I think I will continue to grade as much as possible myself, because the knowledge I gain about students' understanding is invaluable. But know that every time a teacher picks up that red pen they get a little pissed off. One prof told stories about how he yells at students' midterms as he grades them - "NO!" "Don't do that!" "You were doing so well!" "You got it!" "Stop trying to make me fail you! I HATE FAILING PEOPLE!". That's how he vents. For myself, I bitch about my students to my ever loving and supportive partner. My personal ratio seems to be that for every 2 hours of grading I need about 15 minutes of venting more or less. And of course, grading well requires that I spend more time at it, thus increasing the burden on her shoulders and the amount of invective that streams from my mouth.
Grading sucks.
- I am also given student reviews on how much they liked the class, which subsequently affect my reviews from the college and those of my future employers. Lots of good statistics have shown that student's expected grades in a class directly correlate to how much they like a particular teacher, so if you want them to like you, you should give better grades. Giving bad grades isn't just crappy to a student, it also imapcts their review of me. Now you can see some of the pressures that drive grade inflation...