There is always an immensely satisfying moment that occurs on completion of a big pile of marking because, make no mistake about it, marking student work is pretty much always a hard, somewhat depressing, slog. It is a repetitive task and, sadly, often serves to highlight what students don’t know, don’t understand and what they don’t know howt to do rather than being a celebration of creativity, insight and high level performance. It also lays bare any slight ambiguities or uncertainties in the assessment brief and potentially exposes areas of content that perhaps were not taught as well as you hoped or thought they were.
So it was when I recently finished marking my Year 2 Meteorology coursework. There were not too many scripts (18), but each piece of work comprised three quite significant separate elements, and going through each piece of work, writing feedback and grading the work took me the best part of two full days. But then it was done – cue the ‘immensely satisfying moment’. Only that moment of completion was a false dawn… because completing marking of a piece of work is not the same thing as completing the whole process of assessment for a piece of work, as there is a second component of the process – independent internal scrutiny – that has to be done before the marks can be finalised.
Independent Internal Scrutiny can take a number of different forms but in many cases (including this one) it involves finding a colleague who was not associated with the assessment and getting them to look through the set of marked scripts to check that the marks awarded are appropriate and the quality of feedback given is sufficiently high. This has to be done before the work can be returned to students and so almost always it is a process that has to be completed quickly in the brief gap between finishing the marking and returning the work within the University’s agreed timescale. There is a significant challenge here, namely to find a colleague who, although already extremely busy, is willing to give up some of their time at short notice to scrutinise your work. For me, today, during the Easter vacation and with almost all of my colleagues on leave and the work due to be returned to students in two working days time, this challenge could have been impossible, so it was with great relief that my tentative request to my colleague Jill Schwarz produced a rapid ‘yes’ and, better still, a pile of scrutinised marking within the space of a couple of hours.
It is tempting now to breathe the big sigh of relief and savour the ‘immensely satisfying moment’ – the marking is done, the independent internal scrutiny is done, the assessment process is done… but wait, there is still more to do; one final piece of assessment-related torture to carry out. Before I can hand the work back to students I have the joyous task of standing over a hot photocopier, producing copies of a sample of the work to put in a cardboard box so that the External Examiner can (if they choose) scrutinise the assessment and be satisfied that academic standards are being upheld and that the assessment process was carried out in a fair and appropriate manner. And this photocopying process is in itself a major task – removing staples/plastic wallets, selecting the appropriate choice of single or double-sided copying (often both within the same document), unfolding any oversized pages, feeding everything through the copier using every special technique known to humankind to avoid paper jams and then, inevitably, cursing very, very loudly when the photocopier does jam, the paper supply is used up or the toner runs out…
… but that’s a job for tomorrow.
Tim O'Hare 