| in which my peers are brought into sharp relief. |
[Feb. 24th, 2003|03:41 am] |
Damn it, I need to work on my wake/sleep cycle, especially since I've grown a sort of deadline for tomorrow.
See, I've just been grading papers at Nicole's. (Well, before coming back here and watching "Buffy".) And it's been instructional as to why I do so well in school. The answer, obvious as it may seem, is that my peers are all useless bloody morons. I shall enumerate.
Begging the question. When asked, "prove, using x, the fact y", students will write, "because x, y", sort of leaving out the interim steps. You know, the ones the question was actually asking them to write. Oh boy, that deserves a zero.
Insulting me by writing down drivel. I'll get one line of nonsense, in the hopes that partial credit will be given for an incomplete answer. I'm tempted to subtract points for this. It's crude, it's stupid, and, again, it's insulting.
Flamingly obvious cheating. A multi-part problem is given, wherein part (b) is dependent on part (a). In fact, (b) is entirely derived from (a). To my great surprise, I see an erroneous (a) next to a sparkling (b). (Sometimes, (b) is wrong too, but in a different way.) In this instance, (b) could not have been derived from (a). It must have been copied off someone else... and I don't have that much of a problem with sharing work, but when answers are simply copied, pasted and handed in, I am again tempted to assign negative points.
Not showing work. I tend to be pretty intuitive about my math. I may skip a few steps in evaluating an equation, and that's okay. But when you go from a slight modification of the original problem statement to your final answer in a single step, that's grounds for nearly-no credit and an "if you can explain this to me, come to my office hours" note. Obscurity is their problem---you can't just jump to a conclusion if you can't figure out the last steps. I don't care if they think I'm too stupid to understand their work; guesswork ain't gonna cut it.
Proofs that aren't. Shoddy, hastily constructed, absolutely, mind-bogglingly wrong. No, I take that back. Like Pauli said, they're not right, they're not even wrong. Specious logic is used from faulty principles to fail to prove a point. It's depressing.
I thought it would be tough to grade mercilessly. But I don't think I could be a nice guy if I tried. Oh, there are other things... a complete lack of understanding of the material, execrable penmanship and, in some cases, doing the wrong problem entirely. (Example: when asked to prove an algorithm correct, one student analyzes its complexity. Oops. No credit, kiddo.)
I do not give points for effort. I do not give points for good handwriting or typesetting. I give points based on how far from the answer they are. If they have nothing, they get nothing. If they had the right technique, but screwed up, they get a little. But they're going to have to work for their grades. I haven't graded a perfect homework yet, and I'm about four-fifths of the way through the class. They'll learn, or they won't. It's boot camp time. |
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| useful limit. |
[Feb. 24th, 2003|11:43 pm] |
I spent a total of eight of the twenty-four hours preceding my arrival at the lab grading papers. On the plus side, I scored money, or will when those asshats at Payroll decide to give my my due. On the other hand, it's a slightly depressing job, telling all those kids that they're unworthy. Wait, no, I get off on that. I think it's the exposure to rank ignorance (I hesitate to say 'stupidity') in such large doses. It'll seep through my skin and suddenly I'll think that all of the September 11 hijackers came from Iraq or something. Eww.
No one showed up at my office hours today. Typical. I culled ShareReactor links (I swear, there's not enough bandwidth in the world...) and worked on my Numerical Methods project, getting all but one stinking part finished. I can't seem to reformulate "find the fifth root of twelve" in a way that the fixed-point method can solve. I've tried at least a dozen variations; I don't think it's going to work. Oh well, now that I know the caliber of work my peers hand in, I should be all set with what I have.
I got a lot of stuff done today, in an absolute sense. I finished grading those papers, I made a spreadsheet, I found a red-black tree demo (we never did red-black trees in Algorithms and Complexity) and wrote a little how-to. I input tables for the Physics lab due tomorrow night. (I still don't have a copy of REVTeX. And the math department doesn't either. Grr.)
I stopped work around ten, because I wasn't getting anything done. See, I believe there's a finite amount of work that can be accomplished in a day. Even if I have plenty of extra time, it's just not going to get done. Oh, I can do other sorts of things---write lengthy comments in Paula's journal, decorate my room---but once a certain amount of schoolwork is done, it's over. Nothing more comes out of me.
I still don't feel very accomplished. The project for tomorrow has no report attached to it---none was explicitly required---and it's not entirely correct. Foo. The Physics writeup isn't even started; all I did was make some tables and putter. Tomorrow morning is Porn day (for real, this time!) in Women and Violence; I shall need all my skills to prevail. |
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