Well, I finished grading my remaining 15 essays today, with the exception of one essay that was missing page two. Actually, page 2 from a different writing project was there in place of page two of the essay. I’ve emailed the student to please email me the missing page so I can grade the essay. If she doesn’t by Friday, her grade’s going to suffer some.
Anyway, I am now working on grading “form projects”. It’s actually relatively easier, in that grades are assigned mostly not on quality but on whether an attempt was made. Students who actually tried hard to write 6 decent attempts at whatever form they chose get full marks; next down is 5 good attempts; next down is six lazy, unproofread attempts; then five so-so attempts, and so on. There’s no real grading, mind, so I don’t have to be worried about being “fair”. However, since these are going back to students, by mail, I need to at least circle some errors and so on, since many expressed a wish to see feedback on these projects. Argh. Anyway… I’ve read 12 today and have 7 more to go before I sleep, leaving another 32 for tomorrow and maybe the next day.
I think after I finish with form projects, I’ll also set up the Excel files and input grades for my various classes. I have five to do, and only two are subject to the grading curve… and in most cases, the students themselves have pretty much conformed to the curve. I don’t honestly see a lot of writing that fits into the A-level right now. A lot of students seem to have imagined I was teaching them how to do in-text citations, or distributing handouts on the formatting for a Works Cited page, just for my own health, seeing how few of them actually used the information in producing their own essays. (Argh.) So anyway, I should set up the Excel files now. This should be a good three hours of work. Then it’s just a little more grading and input, and I’ll be done. Whew! The deadline is Friday, and I will definitely be done in time, but I also need to get to the Chinese embassy to apply for a visa to China, and I gotta assign grades to a set of final exams, and I gotta trawl through records for all kinds of other grades. I should have set up the Excel files months ago, but I just never got around to it.
It’ll be one of the first things I do next semester.