"Eye of the Tiger": Homework Marking Edition

The first song that played today as I started marking homework assignments was "Eye of the Tiger". I can already imagine the music video!

Sadly, I wasn't done with my marking by the end of the song, as surely would have been the case were this actually a movie montage. Damn.

Ph.D. Comics on Grading

Yes, this is really what it feels like!

My New Grading Scheme

Too Close to Home

This PhD Comics hits way too close to him. The fact is that it's just true, and that makes me sad (although it also makes the comic strip good).

When I was TAing Math 1 at Tech and Wilson was teaching it, he had a great trick that I have occasionally adopted: Let's say that there is a problem on the midterm (or first midterm, if there is more than one) that befuddles lots of people. Put the exact same problem (word for word, number for number, symbol for symbol) on the next exam and see what happens. Keep iterating until people get it. We did this with a problem in Math 1 that year. The same person graded it on both exams, and somehow the average point total was lower the second time it appeared than it was the first. Oy vey.

(Tip of the cap to Ravi Montenegro.)

Celebrating Number 34

Yesterday was my 34th birthday (with 10:50 pm UK time the time where things turned over, according to my birth certificate), so I had a bunch of friends over to celebrate. We played some games, ate some cake, and generally hung out. The main party started at 7pm, and just before that I went out to dinner with my best friend among the locals.

Now it's very quickly back to the old grind, starting with marking quantum mechanics homework tonight. (My students who are taking this have told me that this is the hardest problem sheet they've seen in the 1.5 years that they've been here. I hope I'm not going to have to do all of these problems from scratch tonight---I'd greatly prefer a calmer marking period where I can wing things. We shall see.)

'Overseen' in Oxford

In this blog entry, I'll incorrectly use the term overseen as a visual analog of overhead. But I like it, so I'm going to do it anyway.

As many of you---perhaps most of you---know, I've spent the majority of my days since Monday September 8th marking Masters dissertations. Today I got down to the last two ("Not more than two...") dissertations and the final one, which I just finished, had a very pleasant surprise. Namely, it included the invention of a new chemical element: criterium.

Quote of the Day

Today's quote is: "[Name] is a big cuddly teddy bear compared to you."

Context: I was recently recruited to be one of the assessors of the dissertations that OCIAM's M.Sc. students will be submitting in September. I am replacing someone else, and the comment above reflects our different marking/grading styles and our expectations of what the students probably think of this change.

Anybody who doesn't believe that the above statement is accurate should ask members of my research group who have witnessed the sea of red on their manuscript drafts. (And nobody who knows me should be surprised.)