Extremes Has anyone else noticed that the papers/essays that take the longest to grade, and the students whose semester performance it takes the longest to evaluate, are the weakest ones? Maybe this is only true for me. The worse a paper/essay is, or the more marginal a student's performance, the more comments I want to make and the more guidance I want to give them.

There's a slight inverse effect too, in that really good papers/essays seem to take me longer to grade as well. Those students generally present no problems for their overall semester performance, though, so that's a bit of balance: more time for individual assignments, less time for the overall evaluation.

If the whole class was doing decently but neither extremely well nor extremely poorly, maybe this would all go faster.

[Posted with ecto]  ¶ 12/23/2004 12:06:00 PM