Why is marking so shit?

Why is marking so shit?

Part I

Twice a year everyone teaching in higher education seems to disappear into what I like to call the Marking Abyss. For a few weeks everyone is in crisis mode. Stressed, moody, morose, everyone feels like they’re drowning.

We often have to mark hundreds of exam scripts and essays in an almost impossible short time. Just on a physical level this is exhausting. Reading essays on a computer screen for 9 hours reaps havoc on your eyes and your back. It always leaves me with a constant head ache.

Marking is alienating in the marxist sense of the word. Reading 120 (often very similar) essays leaves you feeling divorced from what you’re doing, unable to really engage with student’s work. Every year it also turns people against one another.

Every year GTAs, module conveners and support staff end up in a weird tug-of-war in which everyone tries to carve out a few extra days to get their part of the work done. And we complain constantly about how others are being inflexible and unreasonable with their expectations.

So why is this happening? Marking could be quite a nice activity. We’ve had students a whole term to teach them things and now is their time to apply what they learned and create something of their own. This could be an opportunity to engage intellectually with students.

There is a whole argument here about how giving grades is itself oppressive that I’m not going to go into now (but check out the link below – dm me if you can’t get past the paywall).

My main concern here is about time. The extremely short deadlines make this so stressful, make us feel like we’re in the middle of a crisis. The thing is that these deadlines aren’t a naturally occurring phenomena. Since this happens every year it would be so so easy to fix.

All we would need to do is push the exam boards out a bit and return the grades a few weeks later. Instead many universities have gone the other way and guarantee students short return times on their grades. The obvious point is that universities don’t care about our wellbeing.

The fixation on returning grades quickly is interesting on another level. The idea is that this is something that is good for students or that ‘students want’. Well maybe they do. But I’m sure students would be happy to wait a little longer if they knew the cost of quick grades.

If nothing else, I’m sure students would much prefer feedback given by someone who is not chronically stressed out, angry, and in pain. Because if we had time to actually engage with what they have written we’d be able to do our jobs so much better.

The problem is that you can’t measure the quality of feedback in the way you can measure time. So turn-around times become a measure of student experience that the universities fixate on, even if it comes at the cost of things that would actually make student’s experience better.

We must also recognise that these manufactured crisis have a disciplinary effect. It is another way we are made to feel that we are failing, insufficiently efficient as well as a way to turn us against one another. A way to make us feel powerless.

Does recognising that help us? I don’t know. We don’t have the power to change the deadlines. But we can recognise that theses are not objective realities. They are a choice that have been made to sacrifice our (mental) health and the quality of our work in the name of metrics.