Marking Assignments

The first thing I notice, is that markers (at university markers are not always lecturers, but may also be third year undergraduates or postgraduate students) are often biased towards a particular assignment that they have in their mind, but don't recognise that there are other ways of interpreting the same assignment criteria which would be equally correct. I also notice that markers often give comments that aren't helpful to students, such as "this is not necessary for this discussion", but they don't back it up with a reason, and no, the reason is not always necessarily obvious!

The main thing about feedback on assignments, in my opinion, is the quality, not quantity of feedback. You want to give quality feedback that is helpful to the student and helps you mark in an efficient manner, rather than writing copious notes of waffle. I have actually once received an essay of markers comments for an essay I submitted. The marker's comments essay was longer than my original essay, and had very few full stops or paragraph divides! Needless to say, I wasn't impressed.

Now a post about marking wouldn't be complete without some mention on "harsh marking". I've never really understood why some teachers are such harsh markers. What is it that they think they are achieving? Is it more than just their own self-fulfilling belief that the subject they teach is so difficult and that today's students are stupid and lazy? Personally I believe that if the majority of students have done badly on an assessment item, that most likely says more about the teacher's quality of teaching than it does about the students' intelligence (there are of course exceptions to all rules of thumb).

What do we achieve by marking harshly?

• lower students self confidence
• lower students self worth
• lower students appreciation for the subject (since many find it difficult to separate the teacher from the subject - it took me many years to realise I didn't dislike maths, I disliked my teachers)
• lower students enthusiasm for learning

Do I need to go on?
So why do we mark things in the first place?

• because the administration demands that we assign marks and grades
• to give students feedback to help them find out what it is they need to work on in their understanding of the topic
• to help us decide how effective our teaching is on that particular topic

So, why mark harshly? I think this is a question for which I will never know the answer.