Marking Works

I’ve recently been receiving a lot of email from the department with regards to my teaching work. At this time of the year, all teaching assistants are drafted in for marking work. There are a number of other things that we have to do but the bulk of the work essentially involves checking and verifying marks after the exam scripts have been marked by the principal assessors.

One of the interesting things that they recommended was for us to work on checking the scripts at home. This is to protect the secrecy and confidentiality of the marks. The idea is that working in the department itself is not sufficiently secure as students can gain access to the papers as we are working on them. The papers also need to be kept safe for review by external examiners and record purposes.

However, in my case, it’s going to be a little bit of an issue for me. I cannot work on it in the main engineering site as I do not have a place to store the papers there. My desk at CAPE is also in an open area without any suitable storage for the papers. So, I would need to work on it at home. However, I have a couple of engineering undergraduates living in my house. So, I would need to hide the papers from them in my room.

The things that we are supposed to check for are pretty standard. I did the very same thing previously. We’re supposed to make sure that every page of the answer scripts have been looked at, that the appropriate marks have been given, and that the marks have been totalled up correctly. According to the emails, it seems that a number of errors have been detected this way in previous years. We’re supposed to raise up a red flag if we spot any problems so that it can be resolved immediately.

I’ve decided to come up with an optimised method of doing the task. Unfortunately, a computer would not help me much in this task. I will start by totalling up the numbers on the front of the answer script to ensure that it is correct. Then, I will flip through the pages to check that the marks on the front correspond to the ones in the answer scripts. Don’t ask me why, but I have a feeling that this is more efficient than doing it the other way around.

So, this means that I’ll have a stack of exam scripts sitting on my desk over the next week or so. I’ll have to go through the mundane task of flipping pages and punching numbers into my trusty scientific calculator. It’ll take me hours to go through all the scripts. I have been allocated several hundred scripts to mark. It’s mind numbing work and I think that I’ll do it between writing up.