How's your marking going?

[KroplaBeskidu]

I'm knee-deep in third year undergraduate essays at the minute and I've got MA essays coming in on Tuesday.

I've deliberately set the assessments for both these modules so that students can be creative and they're actually interesting to read. But, I still find it hard work and hugely frustrating. I find students making the same mistakes time and time again and just not being critical or argumentative enough. I'm social sciences, they need to have an opinion and argue passionately for it.

I'm also astounded every single year at the poor quality of writing, which seems to be getting worse. It's not necessarily a problem with academic writing so much as just writing itself. These are third year, RG students and so many of them have no idea how to use a comma, they start sentences with dependent clauses (I think that's what they're called) and then never finish them and they use completely ridiculous flowery language to make the most simple of points.

OTOH, there are some absolute sterling essays which I love to read.

So, how's your marking going fellow MNers?

I have just marked an MA level research report which had absolutely no citations in it. Not one.

TBH, my essays are a bit like that except that the students in question are native English speakers . The tiny number of international students tend to write better.

They do have citation though - even if sometimes not to any appropriate sources and (often) to things they have clearly not read (and do not understand).

Our assessment outlines specify a lot of this stuff, so more than 12 references per 2500 word essay, not more than 10% over or under the word count, has to be double spaced in 11/12 point font. I also go through what counts as an academic citation (citations to websites/unpublished stuff doesn't count). I specify which referencing systems they can use (no footnotes in my modules!)

I know some of them still do turn in crap with no citations, but then they automatically fail, so it saves having to mark it! It is sometimes harder if they are international students with poor English but you kind of know the ideas are in these somewhere, so they are not completely rubbish, then I am never sure what weight to give to style/slight issues with coherence.

If I failed half the class, they would all make official complaints against me as inadequate, not them!

Despite doing numerous mock tests, I still had two students who failed to turn over to the last page and do the last two questions....

Finished mine yesterday. Still have to do the module review & second marking/moderation forms, but they can wait. I have two book chapters to write over the weekend.

From scratch Nimble?

No thank god. One iive just done - responding to a very detailed set of questions from my editor. The other - I have 4 days and another 8000 words to write, so I think it's going to be late. But I've done a lot of the thinking and pretty much all the research. The editors for that one are going to have to chase me a bit, I suspect.

Another 8000 words I don't think I've ever written a chapter more than 10k words! But then papers are more my discipline.

I wouldn't mind a bit of time to write though, I'm still in marking hell

How do you find the time to write? I have two DC and am a single parent and it is the thing which gets squeezed. Maybe that is its own thread. I need advice on getting it going again.

After having children I can't write at all during weekends/evenings anymore. I have to just block out days and be quite strict about student meetings etc but it's so difficult. I've stopped a lot of my 'citizenship' activities and try to think 'what would [insert male professor name here] do' and therefore just don't attend a lot of departmental meetings etc. Tricky career-wise though because my research isn't going great so that strategy may be cutting me out of a more admin/faculty- focussed career

It's 10,000 words, & I've written 2,500 of it.

I'm single & childless so pick up quite a lot of the citizenship stuff as well as leadership stuff & mentoring etc etc etc as a senior academic, So I spend most weekends in the library because I can rarely rely on clear days during the week (meetings, running stuff & so on). I've blocked my diary until 8:30am on next Weds morning, so I've got 4 days clear run at this, which is great!

We all make sacrifices.

'We all make sacrifices'

Well, that is me told then. I was hoping for some advice after a few really shit years where I feel my research has gone down the pan, while my son's father had not been affected at all. But hey, we do all make sacrifices and I guess a career worth asking about is mine, because writing and research is what counts. Hey ho. Such is life. Good luck with the writing.

Cocoa why don't you start a thread on this? I also found the early years of childrearing very difficult and I was not productive, just exhausted. Lots here have been in similar positions, might be worth seeing what people think?

Cocoa: I find it really hard to find time to write too. Even if I can theoretically find a day in my diary, it a disappears on stupid admin and student support stuff that I can't not do. I have an autoimmune condition and working evenings and weekends regularly makes me ill - plus I do want to spend time with my children.

DH's career however is looking great, possibly because he works in a department that gives him next to no teaching or admin, whereas I work in one where my workload wants me to make the teaching and marking bit come to over 1000 hours a year (and is incredibly miserly on the prep time involved/doesn't account for 3/4 of the admin they increasingly push on to us).

I do need to start adopting the 'what do the men who get promoted and have no significant teaching or admin tasks do?' tactic so that I can avoid being drawn into stuff.

I sacrificed a good career for a really shit one, with 2 kids and an autoimmune condition. It suits me now. Took me a while to get used to it though and I still resent the fuck out of my medical condition.

I spent yesterday conducting Academic Bad Practice vivas (which we're discouraged from calling plagiarism vivas, but do, anyway) on first years who appear not to have grasped, despite many explanations, how the originality software on Turnitin works. Much weeping and gnashing of teeth, many people who apparently uploaded 'the wrong version' of their essay the final version would of course, have removed all the unacknowledged Gradesaver quotations! and a particularly invidious one with three very similar essays and the three students each trying to pin it on one another. In an underventilated office. Our normally extremely nice, gentle and student friendly APO had turned into Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men by about half way through.

Its it wrong to be chuckling at the visual image I got from your description of the APO turning Jack Nicholson???

I'm single & childless so pick up quite a lot of the citizenship stuff as well as leadership stuff & mentoring etc etc etc as a senior academic.

I am a senior academic with young children and I carry the heaviest load in my department, as well as being one of the strongest in research.

It's quite offensive to say that because you're single and childless you pick up more citizenship/leadership/mentoring. This is exactly the kind of prejudice that costs women jobs - the assumption that somebody without children will do more and that women with children don't want leadership roles.

"we all make sacrifices."
Based on what I've seen in nearly 20 years, I'd say mostly women make sacrifices.

I'm sort of halfway through now - one set of exams is done, plus the first set of dissertations. I have second-marking of (fewer) dissertations, and then a bigger set of exams coming. However, the exam isn't in for another week - so I am using this week to write.

I find that (for me) the only way I've kept any writing in my schedule is to look for places that could become gaps, and then assiduously clear out everything else that might creep into that time (admin, small bits of marking, etc), so that they definitely become gaps for writing. I've had an exceptionally heavy teaching load this year, especially this term, so realistically there's been very little writing at any point - but being able to look ahead and think about what I could clear in advance so that weeks like this could be totally uninterrupted has been helpful.

I'm nearly done with one module of exams now, have another 100 scripts to mark this week and then I can get on with research until postgrad projects are in.

This makes interesting reading (the first half).

I'm a primary school teacher and the things I'm nagging my children (Year 5) about are the things you are mentioning that the students aren't doing. Paragraphs, complete sentences, correct use of capital letters, correct use of passive. Interesting.

Well at some point they clearly got told that you start a new paragraph with a new subject - but it's got warped so instead of a new paragraph for each point they think the whole essay is on the same subject = 1 paragraph

Some of mine start a new paragraph for each sentence. So I get either:

1. Incredibly fragmented writing composed of loads of very short sentence paragraphs.

1. What looks like it would be normal paragraphs but are in fact very long 'sentences', where the comma has been abused horribly. It's usually very hard to figure out what these students are trying to say.