Grading is maybe one of the least liked parts of the teaching profession. It is
therefore often delegated away to teaching assistants or to
automated grading systems. That impression is even stereo-typed in movies. In the movie
``Help, I shrunk my teacher", an initially unpopular teacher is shown,
who likes to grade which obviously is weird)!
I actually would like to make the point that grading gives great insight to a teacher.
Doing the grading personally opens a direct insight how students work and solve
problems. It is important however that the students write by hand and not just
fill out forms or boxes online. Also a type writing system hides a lot of the
insight.
We see that also when looking at personal notes and initial drafts of scientists
writing papers or books. Handwritten initial drafts reveal a lot of information
on how the mind struggles to solve a problem and which parts were difficult.
This is often distorted in the actual paper or then textbooks which write about
it. Some who have studied the works say of Einstein are surprised how helpless this
great scientist first was when working on general relativity. Obviously, there had
been important math (Pseudo Riemannian geometry) which had been missing. One knows
today that Einstein got assisted there by mathematicians like
Marcel Grossmann.
Of course, there is the time issue. I have been lucky to be able to allocate a lot
of time to teaching and so also to grading (as I'm not in the publish or perish
mill) and one has to understand that not everybody has. But I would like to make
the point that it is not only the grading, the assessment and valuation of work done
by students which matter, reading original work by students is actually part of
what I would call ``pedagogical explorations" or even ``pedagogical research".
As teachers, we are in interested in not only assessing the work of the student
but also in assessing the work of ourselves. Of course there are the course evaluations
but we all know that they are often just a popularity contest and have sometimes
little to do on how effective the teaching was.
Hitting difficulty in a course is not easy. If the assignments and exams are too difficult
this can also discourage and frustrate. If the assignments and exams are too easy
however, then the entire thing becomes a joke and the gap between what one needs to
know for more advanced courses and what is actually known gets so large that one
hits the wall right after having taken the course. I believe that we have a good
tool to figure out how effective problems are and that this is by doing part of the
grading. I have never taught a course myself where I had not been doing some grading
and it was always highly enlightening (even so one often feels that the time
doing that could be used for better purposes).
At the Harvard Summer school (I teach the multi-variable course
since 2002 every time, this is 19 times so far), I always grade all exams
personally. (2002 was a joint teaching, where we also graded
together). Grading had always been a wonderful way to assess how well things have been
understood and what part of the course has transferred. This summer 2020 semester
was different, as 115 students were in the class which is
more than usual 60-70.
Technology actually makes grading even such an amount quite smooth as one does
not have to shuffle around papers. I get the paper by email, import it to
the ``notability" app, grade with the pen and when finished, send it back
to the student. The grading can be done everywhere, even outside in nature
(which is a challenge with lots of papers and wind blowing) or while watching
additionally a movie (of course a movie which one has seen lots of times already
so that one does not have to spend CPU time there). The above video shows the
process.
Of course, grading needs time and also requires the problems to be written
in a way that they provide information about the thinking process.
But it is a multiple times more valuable than surveys which is usually
the way to probe how students learn.
For me, it is not the grading time but personal consultation time.
Seeing the work of students in real and all of
it, even the multiple-choice problems (one can clearly see patterns even there)
allows to gain a lot of insight in how students learn and is of unimaginable
value, much more than any theoretical mumbo jumbo about pedagogy or
``learning" or shifting the load to automatic
grading systems (which is the fast food of teaching). Unfortunately, in these times,
with remote teaching the personal or small group interaction with as many students
(not with video but in real) was out. This had always been even more valuable in all
classes I have taught the last 30 years. That information was not
possible this summer, but talking during office hours over video was not a bad
substitute. (It will never replace personal interaction however).
Just as an additional benefit from doing the grading on our own and not through
automated grading systems is that these systems harvest all information. It is
clear that the process of transferring higher education from universities to
corporations has sped up considerably during 2020. We do not know where this ends
but it is not hard to predict that even higher education will survive as such
as all is sucked up by external entities.