This should assist those of us in academe.

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/12/a_guide_to_grad.html

Funny, Arnie.

I am wondering, did you get that from Bierma's Blog? When I was perusing his blog last night, I found the same link there.

Grading was the most difficult part of my job as a teacher in Taiwan's only women's college. To assemble the required bell-curve list of final grades for one English Conversation class of 50 I totalled the digits in each student's six-digit identification number, then used the square root of that total for the grade. If it didn't fit between 60 and 100 I added a few points for Good Behavior. Nobody ever objected.

Over the holiday I'll be grading my students speaking and listening esol exams. These are on tape so none of the suggested methods works very well. I propose to check the length of the recording and take the seconds and add 40 to give me a score between 40 and 99%. That seems fair.

Oh, dear God, I hope none of you is serious. Must be the gallows humo[u]r that strikes when one is facing a foot-tall stack of papers that must be graded by X date.

52 % * Wow! This works!



*Estimated on a third party reading. Tape not available.

One of my old professors used to teach a graduate seminar in which the final exam consisted of the following essays: 1) Describe an experiment that will win you the Nobel prize. 2) Explain why you are the only person in the world who can do it. 3) Explain why everyone thinks you are crazy and why they are wrong. A colleague once asked him if he mined them for research ideas. "Are you kidding?" he replied. "I don't even read them. I've got plenty of my own ideas. I just give them all an A."

Since City and Guilds pay markers at a rate that equates to about £2.50 an hour if the job is done properly. So I ask myself, is the low rate of pay decided because C & G realise that examiners don't do a proper job, or do examiners cheat because the rate of pay is so poor?

And am I the only examiner who actually spends around an hour assessing every submitted assignment for the paltry C & G payment of around £2.50, less tax, per script?

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
Since City and Guilds pay markers at a rate that equates to about £2.50 an hour if the job is done properly. So I ask myself, is the low rate of pay decided because C & G realise that examiners don't do a proper job, or do examiners cheat because the rate of pay is so poor?

And am I the only examiner who actually spends around an hour assessing every submitted assignment for the paltry C & G payment of around £2.50, less tax, per script?

As always, your reports of C&G general practice are entirely at odds with my experience of their Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL practice. For each of these areas the papers (which are a joke in themselves) are administered by the course teachers, collected by the course teachers and marked by the course teachers. They are internally verified (at a very low sample rate) by other teachers within the department and externally verified (at an even lower sample rate) by C&G moderators.

All the work done by the teachers - and it can be many hours - is completely unpaid, and, all joking aside, it is done to a very high standard. As far as I can tell the job of the C&G moderator is to check that they were marked in blue ink and verified in green ink.

My role with C & G is not as one of their verifiers, it is as a chief examiner. As such I set examinations and/or get them set by others; chair the moderating committees, format, proof and and print the papers. I also mark my own papers and assignments and return the papers and forms, plus my examiner's report, to C & G. For the marking work I get an average of £2.50 a script.

Unlike teachers and other employed staff I receive no salary or other remunersation, and so the the C & G fee is all I earn from the work.

C & G fees are, I suspect, paid on the basis that the people who serve on their committees and do other work are salaried and thus, in effect their employers are subsiding the C & G operation. When I started working with C & G, back in 1978, this was often the case and, indeed, I was at that time employed by ABTA who were happy to let me have their time to do the work.

However, with the imcrease in self-employment I have thought for some time that the whole remuneration sturcture needs a hard look. I still do the work as it forms part of the service I provide to certain of my customers; I doubt that I would have taken it on were it to have been presented to me this year on the employment basis that it now has.

I will never forget the time, early in my career, that a colleague and I had the entire junior class in the college of nursing in tears. We were doing final grades and the final calculation was all very complicated because they had to get a certain percentage on their exams before we could add in their other work (a college of nursing policy). Well, we had over 100 grades to calculate and to post by noon. We worked hard, into the night, getting the grades done. However, we made one teeny tiny mistake...we forgot to add in the non-exam grades (papers and the like). Of course, that meant that nearly all students failed or received Ds. We were shocked at the final grades and should have gone over the individual grades to make sure they looked logical. However, we didn't...and we posted the grades and went to our Christmas party. Well...our dean got word that there were crowds of students crying outside the doors where the grades were posted, and we were asked to go and see what was wrong. As soon as we got there and the students started showing us their grades, we realized the horrible mistake we had made. Of course, they were so happy to have passed that they didn't make a big deal about it, but we surely learned an important lesson! We used our trusty computer after that fiasco.

The computer wouldn't have helped had you forgotten to have input the data. GIGO!