Lecturers at Maynooth University are supposed to be available on the telephone to deal with queries from students concerning their examinations. And so it came to pass that yesterday I was “on call”. Since I live in Maynooth, I decided to come into campus in case of a query so I could go to the examination venue l to deal with it if required. In the event, however, the examination passed off without incident and nobody called.
I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs all morning though. It seemed a good opportunity to go through the accumulated coursework for this module, applying various exemptions for medical or other reasons, so that when I’ve marked the scripts I can immediately combine the results with the CA component.
The examination venue, incidentally, was not on campus but in the Glenroyal Hotel in Maynooth. The Sports Hall on campus is usually one of the places for examinations to be sat, but it is not available this year due to refurbishment. The other day I was in one of the shops in the shopping centre next to the hotel and there were some complaints about the lack of available car parking spaces owing to so many students parking there for their exams. Anyway, the exam scripts found their way to my office this morning and here I am again, back home with a stack of an examination scripts to mark. The picture shows about 40 papers from my module on Differential Equations and Transform Methods. I want to get them out of the way as quickly as possible as I have another paper coming up on Thursday and have a lot of other things to do before term starts at the beginning of February. All the usual displacement activities having been exahusted, I’ve already made a start. With a bit of luck I’ll complete this task by Thursday.
I’ve often discussed the process of marking examinations with my colleagues and they all have different techniques. What I do is mark one question at a time rather than one script at a time. What I mean by that is that I go through every script marking all the attempts at Question 1, then I start again and do Question 2, etc. I find that this is much quicker and more efficient than marking all the questions in each script then moving onto the next script. The reason for this is that I can upload into my mind the model answer for Question 1 so that it stays there while I mark dozens of attempts at it so I don’t have to keep referring to the marking scheme. Other advantages are that it’s easier to be consistent in giving partial credit when you’re doing the same question over and over again, and that also you spot what the common mistakes are more easily.
Anyway, I’ve decided to take a break for today. I’ll start again tomorrow.
In the Dark 