This is a tricky post as I need to make sure I do not breech
any confidentiality guidelines. I mean I couldn’t, because all the scripts we
mark are anonymised and I’ve never met the students. But you know, it is in my
nature to worry, so I must. This will be a non-pop cultural account of my
experience with marking postgraduate students and a horrible choice for a guide
to anyone who might be preparing a postgraduate assignment, which will be
marked by a poorly paid, frustrated PhD student. There are ways to get on our
good side.
First of all, it might come as a shocker that PhD students
do some of that marking, but said shock can be easily overcome when you start
counting heads in your classroom (or Zoom meeting, as of late) and acquire a
ratio of students to lecturer from said head counting. If this did not make
sense to you, you would likely be one of the students I would bitch about while
marking statistics. In other words, it is not feasible for one lecturer to mark
all assignments, so it is most likely that we will do the initial marking and
then the main lecturer will second mark some of those scripts. If one wants to
ensure that they will get marked by the main lecturer, they could write a terrible
assignment that will most likely fail. Then, as PhD students are filled with
such guilt that Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) himself would envy, we will most
likely ask the main lecturer to fail them instead. That is what I do, anyway
and it is an ironclad technique for better sleep. However, rest assured, we are
doing our best to mark you fairly, as we feel that we are being judged on our
marking ability as well. We wouldn’t jeopardise future income just so that we
can take out our rage for when we were unfairly marked as Master’s students.
And we were. I still believe that whoever marked my developmental psychology
assignment should burn in hell.
Also, I might have not mentioned this enough, but we are
poorly paid. This is precisely why we are the markers of choice. Sometimes to
the extent that our formal responsibility accounts to spending 15 minutes per
script. Regardless, the only way for me to spend the minimum allocated time on
a script is for the student to have gotten a secret copy of our specific
marking criteria, ticked off every box, travel forward in time and read my
feedback and go back to make additional corrections. Otherwise, most of us
reduce our occupational worth in the name of fairness. It is not just
marking each script. I mean, everyone
has their own way, so what if mine includes an Excel sheet in order to find key
characteristics in each submission, team up all the similar scripts and check
that they all fit in the same, beautiful grade band? Does that make me a bit
obsessive? Have I wasted a lot of unnecessary time so I can then get complaints
from students that they feel I have simply glanced over their scripts?
We have collectively stumbled onto some nice, further advice
for students here; please refrain from complaining about your low grade if you
have submitted bullet points for an essay. I generally find that the scripts
that are on the verge of a better mark, but fall just below hardly ever complain;
it is the shitty scripts that I barely gave a pass that come back to haunt me. I
guess it makes sense, if one considers something of that sort as an acceptable
submission for a postgraduate degree, it must all seem pretty uniform in their world.
Having said that, I must now admit to something that I
probably shouldn’t for my future state of mind. PhD students are notoriously
stricter markers that seasoned academics. Supposedly, because we have seen less
insanely bad scenarios and because we ourselves must reach a higher standard for
our work, we do mind when students forget to dot their I’s. And I must admit,
the first year I marked assignments, my instinct was to furiously mark down
anyone who didn’t properly italise. We must all bow to the God’s of font! But
then I realised I would have to fail whole cohorts and decided to overlook the
odd, misplaced comma. Sometimes. Some comma’s are very important! Now I find
myself writing kind, encouraging feedback to students that dealt with a formal
assignment as a ‘Dear diary’ entry. I wish I was exaggerating, but I have
actually read assignments about how their best friends were shy and that
affected their results. With that type of language.
Okay, time to be sincere. Please do not actually take advice
on assignments from this post I wrote up as a break from my marking. It is
filled with sorrow and unnecessary irony. However, if I did have to advise
anyone submitting anything is to look after their assignment, groom it and make
sure that it reflects a good amount of time and effort. I propose that you do
for two main reasons; first of all, we do mark good academic language,
structure, flow and presentation. These do reflect actual points that can get
you from one grade band to another. The second reason is that if we feel that
you have put in a lot of effort and perhaps misunderstood or made a genuine mistake,
we will be on your side. We will skim that script for extra marks, fight the
second marker for that morale boost, or if you have really otherwise fucked up,
write a more polite and instructional feedback section. You can’t lose.
Well, look at the time. Time for me to go back to my crazy Excel
sheet and see if I can bump up anyone who took the time to read APA guidelines
for tables and figures. Those are my favourite people in the world. Run free,
my friends, and spread the word to your fellow classmates about when to use indents
for headings.
Oh, and reference everything. When in doubt; reference. When
not in doubt; become in doubt and, again, reference.
Boohoo
ReplyDelete