Rule against assignments submitted in folders etc

[GameofPhones]

Can any academics explain the reason for this rule about submitting assignments?

"Do not submit the assignment with fancy bindings, folders or plastic envelopes"

To save the marker time? Imagine having to remove and replace paper sheets from complicated bindings to add feedback comments, x 100 assignments it could add hours of work

The person marking will have to carry the essays. Dozens of folders/bindings will make them much, much heavier.

Also, they might end up separated, and then they are unable to know which one belongs to which student.

Fancy bindings are unlikely to be in the assessment criteria. As Risky said, the marker will want to get down to marking immediately without having to faff about with, or be distracted by, extraneous bits of plastic.

Could it be because of anonymity concerns? E.g. if the assignments were handed in directly to the lecturer, and a student handed in a particularly fancy folder or envelope the lecturer was likely to remember. (Tbf doesn't make sense with us, we do all submissions online).

To save you wasting money and time! The binding will have no impact on your mark whatsoever, but if students start to think it might there will be escalating competitive binding wars. Before long people will be spending £200 submitting things in hand-tooled leather "just in case".

Also environmental reasons.

All good reasons, but why does the submission have to be removed from the binder for marking?

@GameofPhones

All good reasons, but why does the submission have to be removed from the binder for marking?

It depends on the binding, but usually there's not room to write in the margin adjoining the binding.

To save time and faff. They’d have to be removed from the binder to be annotated.

Even as a secondary school teacher I ask pupils to hand their books in open to the page I want to mark. It saves so much time.

If you want to put your essays into fancy binders, do so after it’s been returned to you.

Turn the question around.

Why do you want to submit it with fancy binding?

A pile of coursework all in different shiny folders and bindings is a nightmare to stack on a desk or carry around for marking. We used to have a spiral binding machine for student reports but now everything is electronic, I can’t remember the last time I saw a physical submission.

Are some students still submitting paper assignments? Everything is electronic at our place.

I remembered this rule from my time in academia. In course of sending docs by post to solicitor, I wondered if folders (to separate them by category) would be irritating or time-wasting. Paper clips can get caught up on each other.

Oh god I used to hate all the fancy folders. I always took essays out of them, stapled them at the top left hand corner and chucked the folders away, or dumped them in the office.

I could never write comments in the margins and the folders would take up about three times the space, and slither around. And that isn’t counting the extra time it took to get essays out of folders etc.

When we marked paper submissions, I used to specify that essays were handed in sans folders, bindings, or those go isn’t plastic sleeves or envelopes. And that they stapled the pages together securely at the top left hand corner. But still essays came in folders or simply paper clipped together.

Crikey this is making me vaguely in favour of electronic submission! And I pretty much hate marking electronically because of the damage to my eyes.

Our essays (MA) are all double marked so if work was submitted on paper - which I'm not sure we're even allowed to do - I guess it would have to be taken out of a folder to be copied for multiple markers.

I'm currently correcting a pile of first year assignments. I would be grateful if they used a staple...

I got 30 assignments, 5 unstapled with 4 in polypockets and 1 completely loose and just folded in half.

I used to work in n office where we collected all the paper submissions.
Thousands of essays take up a lot of room, fancy folders make them 2 or 3 times as big. You also can't see at a glance who handed them in without opening then up which makes the task of alphabetising and ticking them off a list much lengthier.

Then when the academic comes to collect them for marking they have a big unwieldy pile instead of a nice neat uniform one that they can carry off easily.

Simple plastic wallets are nice but make essays very slippery.

A staple and a cover sheet is all you need.

I'm very glad I don't have to collect paper submissions any more.