Pain Management: Grading: Part II
(Pain Management: Grading: Part I can be found, of all places, here.)
Let’s do it.
It’s a stack of 90 12th grade U.S. Government midterms, 10 pages each, 900 pages in all. I like to do the first page on all of them. Then the second page on all of them, the third and so on. This has two advantages over grading one full test after another. First, it’s faster to grade the same six multiple choice questions or four short answer questions over and over again. It probably kills more of my own brain cells and provides the fullest possible sensation of performing repetitive, unskilled labor, but there is no question that it is faster; and faster is our top priority. Second, grading is probably fairer when done this way. By page two I no longer know whose test I am grading and my semi-conscious desire to exact revenge on children who annoy me is blunted. As well, a student’s brilliant or comically inane response to something on page 4 will not influence my reading of whatever is on page 5.
I begin and I am finding my rhythm on page one. It’s easy. Six multiple choice questions. A, D, A, C, B, D. I am fresh and in 14 minutes I have dispatched with 90 page ones. All of them. Page 2 has 4 multiple choice questions and 2 short answer. The short answer questions are worth three points and partial credit is allowed. The first three tests are slow as I decide how I want to grade the short answer questions. I must estimate the range of generally incorrect, semi-literate responses I might encounter. The most important question quickly becomes What is the difference between a zero and a one? This slow period in beginning a new page is normal and I know the pace will soon pick up. On the fourth exam, however, there is no page two. I look at the next few exams; then the next 20; then 50. Page two is missing from about one third of the stack.
What should I do? The rhythm has been lost; that’s for sure. This is a serious and early blow to forward progress and morale. I can’t afford that and I don’t have a good solution to this problem. I’m angry and starting to panic a little.
Fuck you, page two.
I move on to page three as I reassure myself that I will devise an equitable and ethical fix to the page two matter at a later date. I imagine I will have a separate sitting for all students who did not have page two in their original exam and have them all take it together. They haven’t seen it. They didn’t even notice it was missing. I’ll grade these and add them into their exam totals. This way everybody takes the whole test and those who took page two initially will not have done so in vain. However, somewhere deep in the pre-reptilian base of my brain stem, a plan has already been hatched to simply pretend that page two never existed. Denominators will be adjusted accordingly. I am Stalin and page two is my Trotsky.
As the exam grading moves to page five, progress slows way down. The questions are becoming more involved and the point values greater. Longer answers and essays. Shades of incorrectness multiply as the answers require, though they do not commonly receive, greater nuance and sophistication. My mind is beginning to reject the tedium. And somehow, after five years, I am still surprised, amused and enraged by the sheer volume of lazy, wildly incorrect answers. I’ve stopped laughing though. It’s more angry now and it’s time to stop. Having only graded 14 page 5s, I will have to do this probably two more times for three hour stretches. I’m thinking tomorrow morning, Sunday. My wife will take the kids to the zoo or a museum or something while I perform this vital social function. I might be able to knock it all out in one miserable stretch. Then I will total the points for each exam and enter the scores into my grade book.
A third way to do this, which I do not recommend, is putting it all off until it really just has to be done tomorrow. Then you are up all night or spend one awful Sunday doing all of them. It’s not worth it. The actual time you spend grading will be shorter, but it will be even less pleasant and you will make more mistakes. If you are a rookie, you won’t even be able to do it. You will enter a fugue state after about six hours and the police will find you naked at Starbucks, standing in line trying to order a case of smoke alarms.
In any case, this is tedious, repetitive work that requires brain function somewhere in the neighborhood of digestion and blinking. How much time do you want to spend in this state as you do your job?
Mr. Teachbad
Thank you for reminding me again, Teachbad, why I am glad I am no longer teaching!!
I don’t teach secondary (though did a little bit). I teach elementary so I cannot relate to grading 90 or more papers for one exam. I can, however, tell you that we, at the elementary level, tend to have other tedious, useless paperwork to complete.
In fact, a teacher who is in her 2nd year at my school came from Junior High (left her zoo school). She said she has never had so much bullshit stuff to fill out (e.g. Student & Citizen of the Month bullshit…typical elementary baby bullshit) in her life.
Ultimately, however, whether it’s High School, Middle School, or Elementary School, we’re all overwhelmed with NONSENSE paperwork.
As soon as check, check pluses, and check minuses were replaced with checklists and rubrics, that was the end of normalcy. Well, that crap and a bunch of other shit.
Will I make it till the end of the school year before quitting? Tick tock, tick tock…
Why don’t you have kids write the answers on a central answer sheet? Grading in general is a huge pain in the ass, I’d the kids put all the answers on one or two answer sheets w columns and whatnot it cuts the grading down.
On a side note, is Mr teachbad back in the classroom this year?
Speaking of a centralized answer sheet…
We were told at the last minute that a survey class we had taught (several different instructors had groups of kids that rotated through each discipline in one semester) needed to have a semester exam. As one of the six teachers, I had no way to review for their portion of the test. (I did have the answers)
Out of fairness, I stood in front of the room and read out each question and the students discussed what they thought was the proper answer. I didn’t give them the answers, but I did guide them toward it.
When the papers were graded, scores ran from 100 to 30-something. AND THEY HAD THE ANSWERS.
Somehow, there are some people who think I should be compensated for student performance. How on earth is that fair; some can’t even pass the test with the answers in front of them.
Anything that can be wiggled into multiple choice is. It goes on scantron. I create a separate sheet for longer answers/essays. No one writes “on” the test. Much easier. For me anyway. Grading is so mindless and tedious. Super fast essay grading? Copy and staple the new rubric (whatever it is that day) onto the essay. Circle the categories, make 1 perfunctory comment on paper “Good use of evidence” or some such drivel and bam, essay is done! I look like a freaking genius when I display my essays in the hall. I am the envy of the others.
That’s what I did with essays last year when I taught ELA. It’s not the most time-consuming thing, but still I hate rubrics. I miss check marks and quick, simple number grades :O) lol
This has worked for me! hooray for rubrics – especially when you have 2 honors classes who love to write plus 3 classes of 7-page senior research papers some time in January.
I thought Teachbad is no longer working as a teacher in DC.???
People must find a way to grade that remembers how our employer devalues teachers. We should be able to grade during our workday and I make every effort to do just this. They just don’t pay me enough or value me enough to work day and night. We aren’t volunteers. I have given countless unpaid hours and have been treated like crap by admin and students.
Hey all, let’s talk about Chicago and if anyone hear thinks it is good or not!
I teach elementary…and I have my class check their quizzes and tests in order to “reinforce their learning.” Honestly, I just don’t want to do it myself, because it’s total BS.
I suppose the best part of the standardized testing craze is that for the tested subjects, teachers no longer have to create or grade their own tests. District quarterly assessments administered in order for teachers to track student growth so they can have “data chats” with their students have largely taken the place of teacher created and graded tests. One of the negative consequences, however, is that my Advanced Placement freshmen this year had a heart attack when I gave them their first multiple choice test. They had never seen an old fashioned scantron with small rectangular shaped bubbles. They were only used to the large oval bubbles on district scantrons. I had to coach them through bubbling a smaller different shaped bubble. This is from an Advanced Placement class people.
I’m surprised they still have midterms in D.C. Miami banned midterms and finals in the name of “too much testing”. Oh, well, less grading for me!
I teach high school English–juniors. Junior year is high stakes test year! Juniors must take a state writing assessment, followed by the ACT (mandatory, whether the student intends to go to college or not), and an End-of-Course, which counts for 25% of their semester grade, and 35% of my teacher “value added” grade.
I cannot do just multiple choice tests. It isn’t fair to the kids, and it doesn’t prepare them at all for their writing assessment. I did a lot of writing in high school and college, and I really do see the value of lots of writing practice and assessment. Plus, it drives me wild to see so many illiterate mistakes in the students’ writing–basic things such as apostrophes with contractions, knowing the difference between your and you’re. Things I know they’ve been taught by others, but my sense is that no one has bothered to insist that they apply what they kind of, sort of “know.”
So, this year I have taken it on. They will write, and they will write correctly. Yet my resolve is already fading. I’ve got 160 students this year! My first year (only 4 years ago!) I had 90. The next year, I had 110. The next year I had 130. The next year I had 150.
I just wish someone would do the basic math on this. My admin agrees that students need to write more and to be held accountable for doing it well, not sloppily. But . . . for every shortish essay (say, 5 paragraphs) I assign, I am in for at least 5 min. of reading, marking, commenting, and grade-entering x 160 kids. It is just not a quick and easy process. So, for every essay I assign, I am in for 13+ hours of grading! That’s another work day and a half, after I’ve already spent 40 hours just holding the fort in the classroom.
I know that students improve when they get quick feedback, written comment, and points take off for their careless errors. But I have already spent 3 entire weekends so far this year grading assignments like these.
Well, it is my choice to either keep going or back off. If I made the assignment, of course I shouldn’t complain too much about grading it. But here are two things I do resent (besides having an ever-expanding roster):
1. In my district, only the English teachers are held accountable for teaching, assigning, and grading writing. Shouldn’t those who teach other core high school subjects require at least full sentences, correct punctuation, and so forth? If not, why not?
2. At our back-to-school pd, in an auditorium filled with over 700 district faculty, the superintendent made a special point of asking all of the coaches to stand for applause “for all of the extra time they give.” Hello? First, they get stipends for that, and second, the time required to do a first-rate job in a core academic subject easily rivals the time put in by a coach.
I am more and more with Teachbaby. We “should” be able to get the grading done during our work day. And, our employer surely does devalue our efforts when coaches are applauded (and compensated) whereas classroom teachers are not.
I would like to point out that as the swim coach, I have my coaching duties on top of my regular teaching duties (including grading daily math homework). So it really is extra time put in. It’s almost like another prep, but for 2 hrs/day instead of 50 min.
To TN teacher: Thanks for the props as the kids say. I think that I work hard and I also think my colleagues do too. This is a trying time for educators and I feel we need to name our pain. It is the broken education game that likes scapegoating the teachers. You will probably find many subject teachers who simply can’t stomach illiterate work and correct all such crap. But, each teacher can really only grade for the content of their course. It’s not who among us does less, but rather how did this bullshit systemic mess happen where we all feel used, dissed and abused. Sounds like you are going to burnout if you don’t learn to chill out. Seriously, who can work around the clock? Learning to take care of yourself means you’ll survive. Breathe
I am also a secondary teacher. I have 196 students this year. Luckily (!), I have caught a number of children cheating during tests so that cuts down on the number to correct. Cheating is considered a minor infraction in my district. PASS THE HOOCH!
I have a story for you. It was my second year teaching (which was only 3 years ago). Instead of having a page missing from my midterm, there was an extra page. Yes, I had inadvertently (sp) attached the answer key to to the back of the midterms. The testing program I was using did not allow me to print the exam without an answer key. This I did not know. Anywho, I had one student (ONE) come up to me at the end of 1st period to tell me my major mistake. I scrambled through my 2nd period planning letting all of the other teachers know and making a new exam. It was kind of funny to see my 3rd period kids look at each other weird as if to say “I don’t think the answers provided match the questions anymore”. I ended up retesting my 1st period the next day much to their delight and major catastrophe was avoided.
In the same vein, when I realized that some kids in various classes were cheating, I published different editions of the tests. On the top, next to the subject/unit/date, I put a dot or two, so I knew which test was which.
On the tests I handed to the cheaters, the answers were totally different – sometimes all ‘A’ or all ‘B’ or in a zigzag, or even so that none of the right answers ever were in the same place as on the real tests. It was hilarious to grade their tests and see that they didn’t do anything but copy, distractor answers and all.
Humor is where you find it.
I have 132 U.S. Geography tests to grade this weekend. The test was divided into parts. I’m going to try your method out, and grade all the part 1s, then all the part 2s, etc.
The lower-level classes will be the easiest to grade, as most of the student left half of the answers blank. There was a word bank, and they could’ve at least guessed, but that would’ve required something resembling effort.
and OF COURSE any effort is too much effort for them! i recently gave a multiple choice test and some of the kids didn’t answer some of the questions =/
There’s little reason to put individual comments on papers, because most students don’t read them anyway and the papers end up in the trash (or on the floor, or stuffed behind the book case) anyway. If you take the time to individual correct every question, and then give the paper a number total, it still ends up as a single letter grade in the grade book. Eliminate the middle part and go straight to the grade. You really don’t need to even read most of the test to get the general grade. Those who did nothing :F. Those who did something
. Parse the papers into piles, this one is better than that, and worse than that. If you end up grading a little high, no one complains. If someone comes to you and thinks they should have gotten a better grade, boost it slightly just for caring. Spending more time time grading will not improve their scores.
I had been teaching I-don’t-know-how-long when a student actually argued with me about an answer to a test. I told him, “You are wrong – here is why – but I’m going to give it to you anyway because you cared enough to argue about it.”
I’ve taught different subjects and different grades. One of my fav grading methods is to grade an activity done in class: paper worksheet quiz and I try to do this right with the kid next to me. . I like writing comments both negative or positive. Once I get the feel of the kids work, when I give a test I’ll skim the test to see if there was some major difference in work product. If not, I don’t hand the exam back – no one has ever asked in the schools I’ve been at– then I give them their grade based on my assessment of their effort and learning. Since, the school
frowns on grades that are not C or better, why waste the time?
ugh. i just have to vent. i teach 7th grade pre-AP math in a suburban well-to-do neighborhood. this is a brand new experience to me, b/c for the last 7 years i’ve taught in title 1 schools in the crappiest neighborhoods of 2 different cities. i’ve never had to deal with parents b/c, let’s face it, the parents in those neighborhoods were absent — whatever their reasons, they rarely contacted me and i rarely had the correct contact information for them.
so, back to the present. last week my students took their first unit test, and the test is created by some high up in the district and given to all 7th grade pre-AP students in the district on the exact same day and no copy is allowed to be sent home once they are graded. it’s like that for every unit test. well, my kids bombed it, mostly over small mistakes — circling one answer choice but writing a different answer choice in the blank. leaving of a negative sign- and as per the district, there is no partial credit. it’s all right or all wrong. i did have several kids make perfect scores or scores in the 90′s so, i don’t feel like the test was unreasonable.
i decided that, this being the first test, i would allow test corrections this one time. i sent home a letter detailing when and where the test corrections would take place. i made passes available to all students so that they could attend tutoring times before and after school to correct their tests. they had to be done by last friday.
all weekend i’ve had parents emailing me about when their child could make up their test.
never. your child can never make up their test. b/c they were irresponsible and didn’t come during the allotted time. and our next unit test is 2 days away and God knows i don’t want to be grading make up work from test 1 when i have to grade new work on test 2!
Speaking of grading/paperwork, etc. I’m off due to the holiday and have an IEP meeting on Monday. As with most things, the meeting was rushed and now I have to rush to get this IEP done. It’s 1:58 pm and I still haven’t started it. As Teachbad would joke, this paperwork is waiting…mocking me. It knows I must do it and putting it off will accomplish little or nothing. So, I’m off but instead of feeling relaxed because I’m off, I feel pure anxiety because I know I have to spend time on meaningless paperwork.
LAST YEAR OF BEING A TEACHER… I can’t wait.
I used the digital test grading system. I stacked the answer sheets and drove a nail through the correct answer. I could check the entire class’ quiz at once in two minutes.
An unanticipated bonus of this system was the look on the kids’ faces the first time they received one of their quizzes back looking like it had been peppered with birdshot.
For mid-terms and finals, assuming that a parent might actually want to look at the test (none ever did) I used a slightly more conventional system. I punched out the correct answers on a scoring template. This took considerably longer -perhaps as much as five minutes per class.
If this sounds like I am lazy, think what you will. In fact, I feel that the quality of my tests was head and shoulders above that of most. I always subscribed to the theory (mine) that a test is the last possible chance to actually teach a student anything, so I made sure they had a chance to learn something on the test.
What it was, was a matter of survival. I devoted a huge amount of time to preparation; there wasn’t enough time left in the day to devote an equal amount to testing.