Done Grading!

As it turns out, grading the 101 final exams was much less strenuous than expected. I was so relieved to discover that it took no more than ten minutes per exam, which meant that I finished grading them by Saturday afternoon rather than spending every waking hour of the weekend grading (which is what I expected, based on the half-hour it took to grade the other essays during the semester). What made the difference is that we were basically required to grade the exams without writing any comments--just read it and assign a grade. I didn't realize just how time consuming commenting is! But, my TEAD says that less than a student per semester actually comes back to pick up their exam, so we're advised to just go back and re-read and comment on any papers that students contact us about picking up. Otherwise, the majority of our time would be spent writing comments the students would never see--clearly a waste of time. It also helped that the exams were interesting--the assignment was to revise one of the first two essays from the class and write a reflection essay about that revision process. Reading the reflections was fascinating; and while I had to keep reminding myself that many of the students were probably just writing what they thought I wanted to hear (like "I can now see how much I've learned this semester"), it was clear that some of them really had learned a lot and their writing had improved. And, of course, many of them were sincere in their reflections (like the ones whose grades were already good--they didn't need to kiss up). I heard lots of other GATs complaining about the final exam assignment (it's the same for all 101 classes), and I'll admit that I was skeptical about how beneficial it would be for the students, but after reading a set, I think it is a really good assignment--a chance for them to see how they've improved their writing and show off what they've learned.

So, needless to say, my weekend was much more relaxing than expected! I even watched a couple of movies. I'm completely finished with my classes--I turned in the last assignment in my methods class on Wednesday, and took the final exam for linguistics (early) on Friday. At noon, I'm meeting with DR to go over my final grades for 101 and submit them, then I'm completely done for the semester. it seems like the end to the semester has actually been kind of anticlimactic, but that's nothing to complain about. I'm really looking forward to a little break, and some time to prepare for the spring semester. And, of course, it's exciting to be heading back to ABQ again already.