The other tutor for the course I teach wandered past when I was marking today. She stopped and watched for a minute, as I wrote You need to give evidence to support this next to someone's argument.
"You write comments?" she asked, bewildered.
"Don't you?" I replied, equally baffled. "How else will they learn?"
"When they see they got a bad mark, surely they'll go and look up the right answers in their notes, or read the textbook more carefully, and work out for themselves what they did wrong, " she answered. "We don't get paid enough to write comments."
I shudder to think what her teaching evaluations are like. Specifically the bit that says, "Does the tutor provide useful and timely feedback?"
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
In a perfect world, yes.
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2 Comments:
Oh, I'm ROFL at this one. Apart from all the pedagogical purposes, does this tutor not end up with all the students who got bad grades in her office wanting to know WHY they got bad grades? That's as much a reason why I give comments as anything else - so that students don't end up challenging the grade! (Okay, to help them learn is the better reason, but still.) Maybe students in Australia don't do this like American students do?
We don't get many students challenging the grades (I have had two or three total EVER and these have not been Australians). We get a few who challenge bad addition, though (oops).
And there are a fair number who want to understand every detail of the marking schedule and what they lost their marks for, so yes, I would have expected these ones would drive her insane. They don't usually end up trying to argue anything, though.
Talk to me! (You know you want to!)