The past five days have been consumed in end of the semester final exam madness. I am kinda past the stage of having final exams of my own to take (thank heaven), and I'm not yet to the stage where I am writing the exam and interesting posts like this on the thoughts of the exam writer/proctor. No, I'm stuck in the stage where I get to help proctor, and grade, and keep the other TAs on track.
Every semester, we grade a couple thousand exams. There are 4 common finals for 4 physics classes (intro to mechanics with and without calculus, intro to electromagnetism with and without calculus) and enrollment ranges from a couple hundred to a thousand plus. The latter number is usually full of people in online sections, which poses a special problem in that there are no TAs assigned to those sections.
In the past, since the exams are all taken on a Saturday, we graded them all on Sunday (the next day). When I first started grad school two and a half years ago, this schedule was brutal, but doable. There were closer to 2000 exams, and 10 TAs could grade properly and enter the grades in 12-14 hours.
Problem is, the further the professors get from grading their finals themselves, the longer they make them. We once had to grade an exam with 18 problems, the lowest six of which got dropped, but that still meant they all had to be graded. Combine this with the (kinda understandable) push to include more online sections and you have a perfect storm of grading problems. The number of exams have doubled in number for some of the class but the number of TAs has remained the same or reduced. Grading them in one day was no longer an option. When you have about 5 seconds to grade each problem, you cannot do more than a pass/fail analysis, which isn't fair to anyone, so that had to go.
So this year we spread it out over 4 days, and gave ourselves over 24 hours to get it done (it took 30 hours all told).
For consistency and an ability to give partial credit appropriately, the multi-day method wins hands down. But it also takes more time away from the TAs own exams (I'm an oddity. Most TAs are newer grad students and so still have exams), and it drags out the stress of grading from one intense day to 4 intense days.
Most of us have a love/hate relationship to final exam grading. It's a time suck, it's exhausting and it can be kinda depressing. On the other hand, it generates a kinda of camaraderie among the TAs, that we have done this mountain of work together, that we have passed through all the emotional stages of grading together and when its done we celebrate.
You start out vaguely hopeful--yes, there are a lot of exams, but come on guys, we can do this!
Then you hit a grinding stage where you start expostulating over mistakes--this person can't multiply 2 numbers, they can't do a basic line integral, they said it equals zero and then say it equal pi with no explanation--and celebrating correct answers--this person got everything right! They got everything but the unit! Our lives were not a total waste this semester.
Then you hit the pessimist stage--this will never be done, no one is getting this problem right, why can't you add two numbers together, did I teach you nothing this semester RARRR!
Eventually, somewhere are around the 10 hour mark you hit the giddy stage. You start giggling at everything. Someone starts making random noises. You start laughing at the absurd mistakes people made, not maliciously but as a way to keep from crying. You hold up the particularly egregious ones and ask someone, anyone, to provide an explanation for what this person was thinking so you can award some partial points. The ones that are just full of 'brain barf' provide at least 3 minutes of laughter and commentary and searching for some relevance. The problem asks them to solve for the time to discharge a resistor-capacitor circuit half way, but they have labeled capacitors as resistors and the resistors as inductors, they seem to have thrown every equation they ever learned ever on the page, and ended up trying to solve it using some mismash of Gauss's law and rotational motion and give you an answer of 7 million Newton Joules per Amp radians. It makes no sense at all, not a single thing on the page is right, but there is just so much effort given. A quarter point out of 10 because somewhere among the mess there is a vaguely-relevant-if-you-squint-hard-enough equation or unit.
Somewhere around hour 15 or the 1000th exam, whatever comes first, you move into exhausted stage. This needs to be done. There is still another box of exams, but they have to be graded by midnight. People who have completed their grading pitch in to tally and sort the exams as they are finished, while someone else enters the grades into the spreadsheet just so everyone can leave sooner. Your eyes start having trouble focusing at any distance other than 2 feet, and you aren't sure if you stand up your legs will work anymore, because you haven't moved significantly since you grabbed some food some vague number of hours ago. You are chugging energy drinks, coffee, spicy candy, anything to kick your brain into gear for another hour.
And then its done. They are all graded, even the ones that got stuck in the bottom of the box. They have been sorted according to the professor's wishes, alphabetized and entered. They are back in their appropriate boxes and safely stored for dispersal at an hour when normal human beings conduct their business. High, low and average scores are announced and congratulated and fretted over. You walk outside to breath fresh air for the first time in more hours than you would like to admit, and then you go home and sleep, and wait for the flood of student emails in 2 days.
Ah, the life of a TA.
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