AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I like the "readers of this weblog, of course, are the very most diligent and attentive students".

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Hi,

Love this post and can MAJORLY relate to it. I am currently out of academia, largely because of 15 years of grading papers. And in English, it is all essays, you know?

Worst part is that what you say about grade inflation is beyond true. I could not begin to compare student work from 1989 say to student work from 1999, at comparable institutions. I did a stint at a pretty exclusive engineering school for my PhD, but I don't think it biased me for the state schools I was at, sandwiched around it. I have saved papers from the late 80s and the late 90s and can see the difference.

And grade inflation has made that difference far worse because of the expectation that humanities courses are some variation of PE, where you pass for showing up. Not only that, but they are also treated as the last refuge of those who flunk out of tough gatekeeper courses in other majors.

Once Schools of Education had the lowest SAT scores at universities. I would say now that it is that plus schools of arts and humanities. It is deeply embarrassing to me. You may be at a liberal arts school, but I do technology, and I don't hear much about liberal arts schools hiring cyberculture tech heads.

I'm in a field that pays good attention to pedagogy, which is even more embarrassing. Sciences that simply set up difficult intro lecture sections to weed people out, there is no attention to pedagogy. It is like anti-pedagogy. Yet those fields suffer no backlash because of it.

And here is the absolute worse part, the thing I did not see until the late 1990s. An assumption on the part of students (and their parents) that no grade would be given below a B. I came to know, right up to the time before I left, that for every C I entered in the final grades, I would get multiple phone calls and emails from students and their parents, asking me to please review or consider changing the grade. AUTOMATIC. For a tenure-track person, there is no choice but to give mostly B's, and hold out the A's for the people who earn them. You can't afford to give senior faculty with vendettas any amunition to use against you.

Bitter? yeah, but mostly because I once loved teaching. I knew that grading would be the thing that bled me dry to.

Miasma

Egads. I'm not profoundly bitter (although this may be because it's been several weeks since midterms, and finals haven't come up yet). I do try to separate grading from commenting on papers, to the point of assigning grades via Post-It note initially, then going back through the papers to make sure I'm being somewhat consistent. That way I have more fun with the comments. But, yes, seeing them ignored time after time is frustrating.

As for grade inflation -- or, more precisely, grade compression -- eh. I do find that a combination of essays and paragraph-length ID questions on tests weeds out truly awful students whom one might otherwise feel compelled to pass. I also find that an ironclad attendance policy will at least allow you to fail the students who don't show up, and will produce better work from the students who _do_ (because, shockingly, students who attend classes write better papers). ;)

grading papers....ugh.

The British system of tutorials makes much more sense. You write the paper. You read it. The Don destroys it. Offers you sherry. Puts the paper's argument back together. Offers you another sherry, and kicks out out. All in one hour, pleasant enough even for the tipsy Don.

The British system sounds lovely, but I don't think it would scale well. For those of us teaching 60-100 students per quarter, even an hour of that with each would lead to some pretty serious liver damange.

I'm still grading the sets (scores) of papers noted at my site last and am now taking a respite from the task, happy to write "comments" of another sort. After thirty-plus years of college teaching, I think students are today about the same as those I encountered when I first began darkening classroom doorways in 1968. Do we (change that to "I") inflate (compress) grades much? Not too much. All this electronic grouching suggests only that the medium of complaint has changed more so than the message. Find the old book Course X to see what I mean. Back to work.

AKMA:

I've done my beginning shares of paper grading. Silly dolt me, I'm of the opinion that students learn better by writing papers. Which means, minimally, the bothersome task of commenting and grading.

Hopefully I learned something about writing papers from having had your class. More to the point, I hope I've learned something about grading them.

By the way, if I had my vote, we'd do it the British way. Salve, Britannica!

Interesting comments all. As AKMA's TA I have to say that I take the utmost joy in his grading papers.

Huzzah!

Tripp:

Because you then don't have to?

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.