Grading

It's that time of year again when we're doing that most unrewarding part of our job- marking exam scripts. As an alternative to actually doing them I thought I'd blog a couple of thoughts about doing them and see if any, keen like myself to avoid the actual doing have any responses

1) I prefer the word 'grading' to other descriptions of what we do with scripts as I think it is really similar of sorting eggs into different sizes for 'consumers' of our graduates. Thinking that it is anything more than that I think leads to confusion about the process and distracts from heroic task it is: labelling a human being as a pass, 2.2, 2.1, First class.

2) I think examiners get really confused about what the numbers they assign to examination attempts mean. To try to make explicit some of this confusion or disagreement I like to make the following irritating statement that I actually believe in : Two scripts, one superior to another, can both theoretically get a mark of 100%.

I suppose I'd better get back to grading now but am interested in the thoughts of others on the matter.
Best Regards,
Brenan