As Profgrrrl would say, Gah!

You can tell it's the final day of teaching for the semester and that I am completely whacked, because when giving back the assignments I managed the following screw-ups:

• Gave two students with the same first name the wrong papers back.

• Had the "Where's my paper?" "You didn't hand one in" "Yes I did" "No you didn't" conversation with three different students. One of these conversations ended with me going, "Oh, yes, here it is" and beating my head against the desk; one of them ended with the student going, "Oh wait, it's still in my bag -- I guess that means I didn't hand it in"; and one of them ended in complete and mutual bafflement, followed by me discovering that the student had handed it in to ScaryLecturer instead of me and that he hadn't passed it on to me yet.

• And the worst of the lot: When transcribing the marks onto the students' papers at midnight last night (I mark directly into a spreadsheet, then transfer the marks onto the papers once they are definitely not going to change), I accidentally put the mark belonging to one student (let's call him John Smith) on the paper belonging to a different student that has the same last name (say, Sarah Smith). So Sarah Smith came up to me after class today and said indignantly, "You gave me 75% but I think I should have got 95%." And I smiled skeptically, but looked at the paper and soon realised what had happened. But I still don't know if I transcribed John Smith's mark onto both papers, or if John Smith got a paper with Sarah's 95% written on it (in which case he's unlikely to tell me, but will get a nasty shock when final results come out). So now I have to sort all that out.

• Which reminds me that I forgot to give the students the "don't freak out when you get your final grades for the course" speech. Hopefully one of their other lecturers did. The subject of why students at this university are more likely to freak out on seeing their final grades will have to wait for another post, though. I'm due somewhere five minutes ago.

Gah!