Marking hell

OK, so marking is one of the most boring parts of my job. It's only fun when either entertaining solutions appear (thanks for the effort in week7RSVP, everyone!) or when entertainingly awful solutions are submitted.

The winner this week goes to the student who is already retaking the module (3^rd and final attempt, most likely.) Due to a possibly terminal case of laziness he simply took a copy of his week 7 exercise from last year, renamed the file and submitted it for this year. Using the correct filename suggests that he read at least the 1^st few lines of the assignment this time around. However since last year's and this year's exercises are completely different I guess he was fatigued by the effort of reading a few sentences and didn't go any further ...

Thanks for the laugh, whoever you are (I mark semi-anonymously with ID numbers only.) Needless to say you're failing again this year, but you're not surprised by that, are you?

Cretins

Here's an example: A guy emails me his work saying he can't find the place to submit it online (despite it being clearly labeled on the module web site). He's apparently repeating the module, having failed it last year, and the work he's submitted this year is mostly incomplete apart from the final week's XML exercise (that topic happened to coincide with the same week last year) which is a complete copy of last year's work! (Big fat zero time!) His email is polite (but uses all lower-case letters) and I can't help but think that he's put in about zero effort this year and just assumes he has a chance to pass! To mis-quote Dawg Brown in Cutthroat Island: Stupidity ... who can explain it?

Academic standards are not falling (despite what students might think!)

(You can tell it's marking season...) At least one student obviously thinks that academic standards are falling and that his standard of work can drop too, so he's handed-in an essay that includes a reference to that well-known peer-reviewed journal Nuts! Now writing funny comments in written work can be funny (within reason) but your reference list says a lot about how you researched your work ... we think it's taking honesty a bit to far to admit that whilst doing your work you were reading a tabloid men's magazine and that you thought that some of the content was of such obvious scientific value you just had to reference it! Probaby not "dumbass of the week" material (see the previous post!) but it's in the top 10 for this week :-)

Stupidest copying ever?

You couldn't make this stuff up: A colleague was telling me that a student on her module handed-in an essay that was made up of large chunks of text that were copied verbatim from two research papers. Not unusual, I thought (plagiarism is a problem and we try to be vigilant), until she said that one of the papers was one of hers! Now I appreciate that it's an unwritten rule that you should make sure you look for and reference any relevant papers by your examiners in postgraduate research but it's quite stupidly insulting to copy the text from your supervisor's own papers. <grin> at least it's easy to identify!

Stupid question of the week

Happy 2005! The new year starts by following-on from last year: Santa did not bring this student any more intelligence for christmas! Asking "When does term start?" really does indicate a lack of effort (it's not hard to find out!) or memory (it's in the student handbook, it's not a long document, you did read it like you were asked, didn't you?)

Pride, academic standards and assessment

I've been off-blog lately (lost my server so lost my feed-on-feeds newsfeeds :-( ) and have also been struggling with my conscience. This year, to deter plagiarism, I've requested the early submission of a subsection of the work I usually have handed-in at the end of term (to check on progress and provided earlier feedback, ostensibly.) Because I'm keen on promoting web standards I warned the students I would expect valid XHTML and CSS in all their work. Most of 'em did validation in year 1 and this is year 2 so it was not an unreasonable thing to expect. So I gave 10 marks out of a possible 33 for valid XHTML in a particular exercise whose main point was to take some nasty old HTML4 and XHTML-ise it.

So far, so good, still many students lost the marks but it's 3% of one exercise out of 12 that'll form 40% of their final assessment, so overall the validation points are worth at most 1% of the final module mark (and probably less as the exercise was kinda trivial it'll receive a lower weight than the more complex JavaScript exercises later in the module.)

However one particular student was disappointed to lose those marks as he made a minor change to his work (in good faith) just before submitting it and it resulted in an invalid document. The change was laudable and garnered the two students (out of 140) who attempted it a few bonus marks, and so lost this student 6 marks overall due to the loss of validation. (So that's 6/33/12 of 40% or less than 1%.)

He requested that I explain why he got less then 100% for the exercise at the end of a lecture that finished early (4.30 PM rather than 5 PM) explaining that he knew I was probably tired but that it was what I got paid for, which I felt was unnecessarily combative IMO but I agreed and we spent some time wading through his mark-up whilst I explained my reasoning (which he already knew as I had published my marking scheme in lieu of direct, individual feedback.) I explained that as his mark-up was invalid XHTML it would lose the relevant marks but that his attempt to be clever had earned him some bonus points. He left after 20 minutes, I guess slightly abruptly, but I was tired and felt I'd done enough explaining to satisfy him.

Apparently not: he sent me an email a couple of hours later with a definitely chewed-over tone to it that annoyed me and took me an hour to reply to in a calm, reasonable tone -- pointlessly as it turned-out because I simply irritated him further and his second email just reiterated his position that he felt I was being unfair. So I spoke to him the next day at the start of his lab session and asked if he was OK with my decision regarding the points. This led to a further 20 minute discussion which I eventually terminated with no progress (after becoming increasingly upset by the student's attitude and attempts to use psychology on me.) My standpoint was that he submitted invalid XHTML so lost marks. His was that he'd tried to do something innovative that had led to the mistake and he'd felt under pressure due to the approaching deadline and had accidentally forgotten to re-validate the mark-up so he did not deserve to lose the marks and should be treated "as an individual".

Overall it was a major waste of both of our time and I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes it's pointless to explain/reason/whatever, don't bother, be dictatorial and say "That's the way it is." It saves time...

Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics

Hooray! The Dean-designate has announced the new Faculty name and it is to be Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics ... inclusive, long and unfortunately close to "Fascism" as an acronym but a good compromise choice IMO.

In-class test

In-class test time, again. This year the Blackboard^® system behaved quite well (only 6 students out of 140 started their tests only to have them rejected when they'd finished this year ... unlike last year where dozens of problems occurred.) Sadly, this year's class average is much less than last year's :-( Happily one student got 98% <grin> so kudos to her ... sadly she's an outlier in the data!

Approachability

Sadly it seems I've lost the knack of appearing approachable this year :-(

Yesterday a group of students came to see me regarding my Web Tech. module because the chap they liked from last year who taught HTML was unavailable -- the spokesperson confessed that the others were unwilling to talk to me due to being scared(?!) Today there's an anonymous post on a discussion board complaining that the workload is too high this term ... but this 3^rd year is obviously also unwilling to talk to me about it... I don't feel more ferocious this year, perhaps they're more timid and I'd not noticed? Ah well, perhaps I'll reduce the lecture sarcasm next week...

Support procedures: "want, take, have"

2 weeks ago our ICT department informed me (via a roundabout route) that the server I administer seemed to have been infected with a trojan. I worked on removing it for a day or-so and heard nothing further from support so relaxed ... until today, 2 weeks later, I arrive at work to find that ICT have marched in and shut down the server without informing or asking anyone other than the Science tech. staff who have the key to the server room! A bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. So, the web pages hosted on the server, databases (student and mine), student work and lecture material are all gone¹ without so much as a by-your-leave :-( If we want access to their resources we ave to fill-in a form, submit it, wait 3-5 days, and hope. If they want something it's "want-take-have" (to misquote Faith in a certain episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer <grin>)

¹"OK, what about a backup?" you say. Sure ... it's backed-up, but the server is corrupt and the backup is on a system only that server can read (durrrrr...) I've a DAT tape backup too, but no PC-compatible DAT reader whilst our Science tech. is in sick-leave... <sigh>