What a wonderful world this would be.

[austin_dern]

For the last homeworks in my freshman course I made a foolish mistake I keep making: I asked essay questions. The easiest questions to grade are computational: solve this by this formula. There's usually one or two ways to answer, a small set of mistakes most students fall prey to, and you can grade at a glance. Only one or two students write out space-cadet answers needing careful examination.

But essay questions ... my best students got it exactly -- compare these three alternatives, list at least one clear benefit and one drawback of each; three paragraphs suffice. How do you grade it, though, when the given answer is a cryptic half-sentence that might be something correct, but looks like a stab in the dark? Or a student rambling, mentioning so many irrelevancies it's clear they knew if they talked enough they'd say something right?

I'm glad I don't teach liberal arts courses with many essay questions; but, then, if I did I'd have an idea how to grade these cases. Much easier, as a grad student, was grading computer labs with computational questions interspersed with very tightly focused short-answer questions; one could grade on correctness and even on grammar and spelling (and you haven't heard whining until you've heard engineering majors insisting they don't have to know the difference between it's and its; happily, my professors always backed me up).

Worse, of course, is I asked easy questions. If anything other than the first question is a softball, many students freeze up, either turning it into a difficult question or skipping it entirely. It would be so much less work if everyone would just answer right instead.

Trivia: Melpomene, asteroid number 18, discovered 24 June 1852 by J. R. Hind at London, was the first body in the solar system not given a zodiacal symbol. Source: Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, Lutz D. Schmadel.

Currently Reading: `T. E. Lawrence': In Arabia and After, Basil H. Liddell-Hart.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Believe me, having a humanities background doesn't make it so I know how to grade weird essay answers. On the other hand, nothing is worse than grading papers. The rambling and incoherence that can, and often does, happen in papers makes it a long, slow job to read and grade them. I see papers so badly written that I wonder how the person got through high school, let alone their freshman composition class. This is why, when I can get away with it, I assign essay exams instead of papers.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Rats ... I was hoping you'd have hints. At least there is the simplifying factor that if the essay question (for a homework) is perceived as too difficult, students clump together and basically copy answers from one another. While that means they aren't really learning (except to the extent explaining an answer forces the explainer to learn it), at least it means I have fewer distinct answers to figure out grades for.

Also a big part of this class was original essays written on various computational-science topics. An amazing number of students don't seem to realize that I can pick sentences from their essays and see where they come up on Google. Cheating is one thing, but lazy cheating shows a lack of respect for me and my time.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it. I've had three more plagiarism cases come up since the one I wrote the rant about previously -- and one of them was a repeat offender, again. It's always bloody SparkNotes, too. Do they think I don't know about it?

[natasha-nelson.livejournal.com]

Regarding your trivia pointer: You, ahem, tragically forgot to mention whom the asteroid is named after (http://www.eliki.com/portals/fantasy/circle/melpomene.html).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize the muse of tragedy wouldn't be recognized ... the name was even used for one of the planets in Asimov's Foundation and Earth; I thought it was common nerd currency now. Sorry for that.

Melpomene was named, for the curious, by George Biddel Airy (1801-1892), the astronomer whose 1851 telescope eventually became the precise zero longitude. He's also famous for not looking at the sky based on the work of John Couch Adams (1819-1892), who mathematically predicted the existence of Neptune and thus losing them both the chance to discover a planet and solve the greatest astronomical mystery of the early 19th century.

Airy's choice of name was prompted by the death of his son Arthur on 24 June 1839, and then of his daughter Elizabeth on 24 June 1852; when he saw the asteroid he was asked to name was also discovered on 24 June, his thoughts unavoidably ran to tragedy.

[butterfluff.livejournal.com]

I drove my assembly language teacher crazy because I consistently used data as a plural. He was usually an English teacher, so he treated assembly as a language, not as mathematics. He was always taking points off for grammar and spelling. I told him he could get points from me for 'data' the first time I used it inconsistently in a paper.

I won. The only spelling he ever got me for was 'explaination' instead of the correct 'explanation.'

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's a curious objection for an English teacher to have, actually, considering data is pretty well established as either singular or plural. But most attempts to encourage good English usage -- a constant obsession in Singapore; the government is terrified Singlish use will lead to economic ostracizing -- flounder on outright insane hair-and-participle-splitting points.

One letter-writer to The Straits Times a few months back took took his son's teacher to task for saying ``Everyone please turn in their papers''. I thought the objection was going to be to the use of ``their'' as third-person singular, an unfortunate but probably unavoidable choice (``one's papers'' sounds stilted everywhere but East Anglia). No. The letter-writer insisted it would set a better example had the teacher said ``Everyone please pass up their papers.'' I still can't appreciate how that would be better.