Work faster!
How can you get more things done is less time? There’s a viral video with Arnold Schwarzenegger where one of his key points is to simply do things faster. I really like this video. The funniest part is when he tells people who complain that they don’t have time because they need to get enough sleep, to just “Sleep fasta” [Austrian accent]. I am not claiming that sleep is overrated, but Arnie’s got a very good point here. Don’t waste time on things that does not matter. I tried it out this weekend when correcting exams.
I had close to 40 exams to grade in my Building physics course, and that is a job that can easily take a couple of days to finish. However, I only had around four hours on Saturday and another four on Sunday and the deadline for grading was closing in, so I only had one way to do it. The Arnie way. I just grabbed my red pen and got going, and I graded those exams as fast as humanly possible. It took me around 9 hours to finish, in two sessions. No breaks. It was an enlightening experience! To over-analyze and polish way past the point of diminishing returns has always been one of my greatest weaknesses. But I am constantly finding new ways around that problem. And every time I find a faster way, I know that next time I can increase the speed even more.
When grading exams, it is crucial to do it in a safe and just way. Doing the work in hyper-speed surely adds a small risk of mistakes on the teacher’s part. The way around it I believe, is to formulate wise questions so that you can determine the score on each task just by looking wholistically at the student’s solution and scanning for key steps that will grant points. I have learned the hard way what happens when you formulate a bad exam question that leaves the door open for different interpretations. When that happens, the grading workload increases exponentially. Older and somewhat wiser now, I determined clearly to myself which key steps in the solution that would grant points. If these key steps were missing, then I awarded zero points. That was a method that work fantastically in this course! Some exams with proper solutions, I could grade one problem in less than 15 seconds. The student solutions that deviated from the correct path, however, could require a lot more time, a couple of minutes at least.
So, the best advice I can give you if you are designing an exam is to think through your questions very thoroughly. Define the key steps that gives points and make them super-clear. That way, you will save a tremendous amount of time when you get the written exams back to grade them. The importance of this cannot be over-stated. It is such a wonderful feeling to correct a whole problem in just 15 seconds. Honestly, this method relates to the speed-reading concept I investigated last week.
But really, the whole process of writing and grading exams using analog pen and paper felt very tedious. Surely, there must be a smarter way to handle the exams by now. I look forward to the day when such systems become more mainstream. We are talking about quite a lot of time here! This is a task that can be handled by intelligent automation. And there are a lot of teachers around the globe who will spend quite a lot of hours on the task of just flipping papers when correcting their exams. I do not believe that this is a wise way to utilize our teacher’s precious time.
Do you know of some way to handle e-exams?