Today I have been working at home (mostly) marking student coursework. I need to say at the outset that I hate marking. It is a task that never leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction at a job well done. Generally, I find that most of the work I mark is of a fairly mediocre standard, seemingly thrown together with nothing like the care and attention to detail that I think is appropriate. It is like the students simply see pieces of coursework as tasks that have to be got out of the way as quickly as possible, or with the least pain possible, rather than as opportunities to showcase their knowledge, creativity, insight etc. I have told students this on countless occasions, both before and after completing work for me, but the message never seems to get through. I suppose this means that I need to re-examine HOW I am transmitting this message to the students. ‘Something’ always seems to be ‘good enough’.
I suspect that I have a reputation as a hard marker. I suspect that students submitting work for my assignments THINK they deserve better marks. I am pretty sure that I do tend to mark with a somewhat negative mindset, at least in the sense that I notice everything that is wrong or unclear or lacking ahead of noticing things that are right. So I probably could adopt a more positive approach and look much more for the good in pieces of work and/or for the comments I can make to help a student improve rather than pointing out or correcting shortcomings. But this is difficult when so much of the work that is submitted is, to use a ‘word’ that seems to have come into fashion these days, just ‘meh’. This kind of work is not wrong (mostly), it’s just lacking in spark and displaying such a paucity of pride or self-respect. Faced with a sequence of ‘meh’ scripts I find it very difficult not to descend into a negative mindset.
Anyway, today I marked 18 questions, the first of two that students had completed for an assignment on my Year 2 Meteorology module. There was quite a lot of ‘meh’ work in the batch but I THINK I managed to hold on to the line of thought that my role was to offer positive suggestions for improvement whilst still indicating the areas of weakness. Pleasingly, there were a couple of really good pieces of work in the pile, one especially that really showed that the student had taken time to 1) understand everything that they were doing and 2) [importantly in my view] THINK about how to get this across to me. This piece of work was embued with a real sense of the student wanting to display their best self to me. Fortunately, it came towards the end of the [virtual] pile so it left me with a somewhat positive feeling about the whole day’s work – a fortunate piece of happenstance if ever there was one.
Tim O'Hare 