Grading from 11pm until 5am
TAing brings bitter, bitter hatred to my heart.
Some of my latest comments:
- why? you didn’t show this?
- why?
- really bad notation
- which direction is this supposed to prove? Either way, it is unclear
- why is this relevant?
- what is this squiggle? I assume it’s an n. Write carefully, if you want me to grade carefully
- is this an m?
- Which direction is this supposed to prove? I can’t read your mind, so in the future, state what you’re going to prove before you start writing equations down. Looking at this now, do *you* even know what you were doing?
- how does this follow?
- What are you doing? Explain in words; what is (some personal math notation they invented, and I’m supposed to understand)
- This is a horrible write-up. If you can’t avoid a lot of calculations, then you should make them legible and palatable. This is chicken scratch.
- How did you define S? It’s not clear to me you understand what you’re doing
- don’t understand where you’re going here
I need to start grading in small batches, maybe ten assignments a day, because otherwise I’m going to choke on my bile… or write something I’ll regret on some poor idiot’s problem set.
Possibly relevant posts:
- UH’s second annual middle and high school math competition (2/20/2006)
- And the grades are in… (3/23/2007)
- Friendship (3/27/2003)
This brings to mind a Finite Math exam I had to grade during my tutoring/grading days. The exam was a complete mess, I mean, very few students could solve even the very basic problems. And mind you, this is class that can be grouped with College Algebra and other elementary mathematics. So I became increasingly frustrated with these students. In fact I distinctly remember a simplex-method optimization problem on which the student scribbled some nonsense, to which, I amusedly wrote an equally irrelevant and nonsensical comment:
“You have incorrectly applied the Heine-Borel Theorem here”
Nice! I’ll have to try that one in the future.