angela's blog

I don't exam well. I just don't. I never have. I don't like tests where I walk in and I have 4 options for every question and I have to pick one and my fate in that class (or on the driver's license exam) is determined by whether I've picked right. I write better than I mulitple-choice (yes, I did just verb that term) and I would prefer a 10 page paper over a 50 question multiple choice exam any day. However ... today I've been on the other end of the spectrum. I'm grading papers. Lots of them. 19 5-page papers. That's 95 pages about the SAME PROJECT over and over in varying degrees of quality. Some of them are unreal ... they are so good that I wonder whether the author should even be an undergraduate. Give the kid a grant, send the kid off to graduate school. And some of them are just downright pathetic. Did they just not hear a word I said in class? You know that when, in the first two sentences of a paper, a student refers to the wrong personality theory that the rest of the paper is just going to be downhill. I have been plowing through these papers going on 5 hours now and I have 3 left. Plus, I think my students are going to hate me. I'm a tough grader. Or I have high expectations. Either way, now I know why the multiple choice exam is so popular. So the instructors don't have to do THIS ... arrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

Posted by Mrs. Cooper on 10.15.2004 at 10/15/2004 08:38:00 PM | Permalink