Earlier I came across an article discussing the findings of an interesting study (i.e. https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-last-name-skew-grades/) where the authors claimed to have detected evidence of a systematic bias against students whose surnames fall later in the alphabet than those whose surnames appeared earlier (when assignments / exams get presented to the marker in alphabetical order, due to the increased used of Learning Management Systems that commonly sort in alphabetical order by default).
TBH, anyone who has spent enough time grading large sets of assignments (*) can probably explain why:
The first time you see a particular mistake / class of stupidity, you do tend to react kinder to it. But by the nth time, it really starts to grate...
A similar thing applies when screening through CV's and applications for a position:
The first time you see some new-grad / early career applicant mention doing an internship or something with some name-brand company, it does sound pretty impressive. However, if they have the misfortune of also applying for the same position along with a bunch of other new-grads who also took part in that same internship / etc., this now starts to count against *all* of them (i.e. "meh... it was maybe just a class assignment / group project type situation, where all the interns were held in an sandpit and given some kind of toy / training exercise")
(*) In my case, there was one semester where I ended up having to take over marking all the weekly lab reports that students had to make for a particular course. For additional context:
1) The previous year, the lecturer had really struggled to get through these, with lots of student complaints about the delay in getting feedback back to them).
2) Of course, the following year, I asked to not work on that course again, as that grading exercise had taken way too much of my time (i.e. roughly 20 hours per week, for the 5-6 consecutive weeks it took to get through the series of corresponding reports), and also, I wanted to try my hand at other courses... ;)
3) I learned a very good lesson from this: NEVER EVER set such a workload for yourself, your teaching assistants, and your students! The effort required from everyone to make this approach work (if you want to do it with even any semblance of doing a decent / acceptable job without causing any miscarriages of justice) requires MUCH more of a cost than is worth bearing (and that may be initially estimated).
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So, you may be wondering, how did it end up taking so long?
TBH, I only really spent time on two types of student work:
1) The really hopeless ones (i.e. those "2 page" assignments they would hand in physically look really flimsy / skimpy / pathetic if/when you end up printing them out double-sided (which we did for the first two rounds); you quickly realise that to hand in something that barren, the student would only be able to fit a bunch of 1-line half-baked semi-responses, while barely interacting with the material in any meaningful way)
Thus, you end up spending time on those to hopefully coach them to be able to pass
(*) even when it's obvious in some of these cases that that isn't really going to happen, as they have a really active social calendar due to being heavily involved in certain clubs)
2) The really high performers - Those folk deserve the respect of having someone actually offering detailed + well considered feedback. From personal experience, anything less feels disrespectful (i.e. "I went through all that effort, and the marker barely even *looked* at it... :(")
As for the bulk of students who'd get "middling middle grades":
TBH there was often not much to be done... (i.e. these would be pretty obvious - typically about 5-6 pages long, and expend do "just enough" effort)
They were passable attempts, but not stellar by any means, and it was often quite clear that that's where the students were probably pitching their efforts (and would probably be pretty happy with that - "just a passing grade will do")
So, relatively speaking, not much time needed to be spent there - other than double-checking around any borderline decisions.
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Hopefully if any of my former students come across this they will not be too offended. I didn't originally set out to do it this way - it's just what ended up happening after getting into a rhythm for getting through these...
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