SEB Bulletin March 2008
Ratbag
Dr Workhard was doing the job he hated above all others - marking exams. He felt it was the most onerous task an academic had to do. It was not just the time but the sheer tedium of having to read answers that were boringly the same, sometimes breathtakingly wrong, and only occasionally brilliant. Even though he knew it was important to get the marks correct, he could not summon up any enthusiasm for it. Worse still, now there were exams in each semester, he had a double load each year. He was definitely feeling hard done by.
Over the years he had tried various ways to ease the pain. He had campaigned at length for the Department to introduce questions that could be marked by computers but had failed. For a time he had hired postdocs and PhD students to mark the papers but had given up when he found they were selling the best answers to web-based essay-writing companies. For a time, he had set really hard questions in the hope that no-one would attempt them but had stopped when he heard a boycott of his courses was planned.
Now on his desk were 250 essay-length answers for the exam on his first year course, “Metabolic Diseases and Their Treatment”. He knew it would take him at least three days of solid effort to complete the marking but two had gone already. He could just not get down to it and always found displacement activities to do instead, such as cleaning up his e-mail accounts, backing up his hard disk, throwing away all the excess papers in his filing cabinets, and wiping all those old faded marks off the whiteboard. After two days of effort he had reduced the pile of unmarked scripts by only twenty. Today he was much more determined and told himself he must get at least one hundred done.
He had begun in great style, polishing off thirty by lunchtime. But then he made the fateful error of checking the latest news on the University website. There were several interesting items and he soon found himself following the links to other sites which led him deeper into cyberspace and sources of esoteric information he never knew existed. It was fascinating stuff and he lost all track of time until Minnie Picksel, the exam coordinator, knocked on his door to remind him she needed his marks by noon tomorrow. Looking up he noticed that it was getting dark outside - he had spent hours surfing the web and still had 200 scripts to mark!
In desperation he realised there was no way he could complete the task if he stuck to a rigorous system. Then he considered the fact that it was only a first year exam and by the end of a student's three years of study the marks he assigned not would make a negligible contribution to the final degree classification. Even if he was grossly out in his assessment of an answer its long term effect would be minimal. It might have a bigger effect on the performance for the first year but, when he calculated it, he realised that the largest impact effect his score could make was 10% when marks across all courses were aggregated.
Thus reassured, he sorted the remaining scripts randomly into seven piles with few in the first and last piles and most in the middle ones so that when placed side-by-side they looked like a bell-shaped curve. To the answers in the first stack he gave a mark of over 80%, to those in the second 70-80% and so on down to 25-40% for the last pile, adjusting the range of marks so they were narrower for the middle stacks. In half an hour he had a mark for each answer. Then, just to be sure he hadn't been too unfair, he checked six papers from each mark group. Remarkably he found the system gave scores that were as almost as accurate as those he would have awarded after a more intensive reading. There were a few anomalies, which he corrected, but, to his surprise, the discrepancies weren't massive. By 8 pm he had the task complete. Job done, he resolved to use this method for all first year exams in future. He had just efficiently removed the biggest chore of his academic life. While a few students might complain, what was that compared to his happiness?