My final exams were due yesterday, and the students worked hard and got them all done and submitted online. I imported them all into Google Docs so I could mark them up electronically, and there they all are, lined up in nice tidy rows and columns on my drive, pristine and clean and organized. Lookin’ good! Pages and pages and pages of neatly typed essays and answers to problems! I give the computer an A+ for holding and organizing all that data. I admire the students for getting so much done.
Wait, what do mean, I’m not done?
I have to read all these things? And grade them?
Holy hell, that’s insane. Look at all of them! And I’m so damn tired.
OK, here’s the deal. I’m going to flee the house on a morning walk, but I’ll come back and then buckle down to methodically plowing through all this stuff, with the goal of maybe getting it all done by Friday, because I have things to do. I’m not going to enjoy myself, though. But I know I’ve got 58 students waiting anxiously on my final judgment, so I guess I’m going to have to do it.
But then, this weekend, I intend to be completely free.
Silly me. I thought the next step was to apply ML to the dataset and target them with ads. (You’re in a such a labor-intensive business!)
This would be a terrible time for ransomware to strike your computer.
“The students are all done” would sound more omnious if uttered by Anthony Hopkins while closing the lid of a freezer.
there they all are, lined up in nice tidy rows and columns on my drive
For a moment, I could not figure out why they were on the drive; some new version of Oxford marking using the car?
It’s an online lecture course. Everything is done through Canvas; student assignments come through Canvas, then I upload them to Google Drive, because the Canvas editor doesn’t allow me to make comments on a paper, but Google Docs does.
Remember the old days when you’d get their work on paper, and you could just whip out your red pen and scribble away?
Geez, PZ, what sort of penny-ante implementation of Canvas do you have at UMM? We have SpeedGrader in Canvas at my college, which displays all uploaded papers for multiple modes of mark-up. I normally cruise through them on my tablet, annotating solutions (or alleged solutions) with a smart pen in free hand (perfect for math notation, although I could type comments, too). It’s one of the few things that made the semester tolerable. But my semester isn’t over, with finals to be administered on Monday and Wednesday. So close!