Gradedown! Post 9 -- Grades are in!

A few minutes ago I submitted grades to MOR for approval. If he approves them today, it is my understanding that they will go online around midnight tonight.

If you're impatient to see your grade, feel free to send me an email! Forgive me if it takes a little while to get back to you -- now that I'm done grading for the semester, I can devote fuller attention to packing up the rest of my apartment.

It has been a pleasure working with you all this semester: this was the first non-100-level English course I've taught, and it has been a welcome challenge to try to keep up with active and critical readers. Please don't hesitate to stay in touch!

Gradedown! Post 8

My grades are due in to MOR tomorrow afternoon, so this might well be the last Gradedown! before the end. Check back later this week for some thoughts about how you might keep your literary muscles in shape for the summer!

Right now, all I have left to grade are

• 18 hebdomadals.

I've been finding that these last hebdomadals are, with some exceptions, the most consistently strong textual interpretation and analysis I've seen this semester. It seems that the brutal practice of writing weekly hebdomadals helped many of you find the right language with which to articulate your literary investigations. I know that as a student it can feel as though all learning is too incremental to be immediately appreciable; however, if you were only to look back at your first hebdomadal and your last you might immediately appreciate the ways you've become better writers. In fact, you might want to go do that now.

Consider Louis Menand's remarks about higher education in last week's New Yorker. He concludes that in recent years colleges and universities have sought to make students feel prepared for whatever unpredictable life awaits them, whereas in fact students would do far better to be aware of just how unprepared they are, and how impossible it would be to be prepared. In an odd way, an English degree can do what a business degree can't: it can show you what happened when Beckett, and T. S. Eliot, and Auden, and Woolf -- all at the heights of their careers -- came into direct and expressive contact with the real, and found themselves lost and hapless.

Is it learning, then, to be able more effectively to articulate the techniques and the nuances by which these writers understand their blindness and their confusion? I think so, if only because it gives you (1) the language with which to describe to yourself your own situation when you look around you in three months or three years and feel that utter panic of uncertainty, and it gives you (2) the absolute certainty that people have been here before, and that comparatively few of those people drowned themselves.

Gradedown! Post 7

Due to a counting-related problem, I had 10 more hebdomadals than I thought. After a couple hours of grading last night and this morning, however, I am down to (I think)

• 37 hebdomadals

It is taking me on average 5-6 minutes to grade each hebdomadal, which means I can do about 10 hebdomadals an hour -- meaning about 4 more hours of grading. These numbers mean that my comments on your hebdomadals are becoming increasingly terse. If you would like me to expand on any of my remarks, please don't hesitate to email me back. (If your question isn't urgent, I might delay until after grades are in to respond.)

I really wish I had set up hebdomadals to be more responsive -- I ask a question on the blog, you respond in your hebdomadal, I ask a question in my response to your hebdomadal, you answer my question in your next hebdomadal, and so on.

Gradedown! Post 6

I managed to finish the rest of the exam essays yesterday, leaving me with just:

• 45 hebdomadals

My mother is flying into town in a couple hours -- she hasn't come here to visit since 2002 -- so I hope to spend most of my weekend with her. Still, if I can fit in a couple good bouts of grading then there's still hope that grades will go in on Tuesday. I'll keep you posted.

Congratulations with the end of finals, everyone!

Gradedown! Post 5

Thursdays are usually given over to planning for section, so you might have imagined that my habits would lead me to focus on pushing through grading hebdomadals. Hah! Today was more of a packing (and video games) sort of day than yesterday was, but that's not to say it was a complete wash. If my counting skills aren't letting me down, I have left

• 31 exam essays
• 47 hebdomadals (still)

Unless I get overwhelmed trying to move my books tomorrow, it might in fact be possible to finish grading by the Tuesday deadline. (I have an ugly history of turning in my grades at the last possible second -- it's a wonder that MOR agreed to let me teach for him again.) Weirdly enough, all this blogging seems to have helped keep me on track. Huh.

I found that the second essay topic -- about violence in the action and structure of texts -- was a serious stumbling block. I've graded all the essays on the first (texts within texts) and second topics, and for some reason essays written on the first topic were substantially better than essays written on the second.

I wrote the second topic, actually, so it's really important to me that I figure out what went on here so I don't do it again. It doesn't seem to me that the second prompt is inherently more difficult than the first -- both ask writers to engage with structural and thematic analysis. Is it simply that we've had a couple of discussions that center around the texts-within-texts problem, and that we only began discussing violence last week?

By the way, if you could read through all the answers I got to this topic you might get a better understanding of why I appreciate essays that make use of unexpected texts. I read four essays in a row that looked at violence in "Porphyria's Lover," Disgrace, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The two of you who used Middlemarch get major props for venturing beyond the obvious -- thank you. (Weirdly, almost no one wrote about "Goblin Market." I guess it's hard to predict exactly what texts count as obvious.)

By the way, thank you guys for the comments on earlier Gradedown! posts: you're helping to keep me awake and working away.

Gradedown! Post 4

Finally began attacking the essays last night, leaving me with:

• 47 hebdomadals
• 48 exam essays

It's always somewhat amusing to see all the heat-of-the-moment misnamings that come through on the exams. Within a single essay, for example, there might be a Dr. Jekyll, a Dr. Jeckyl, a Dr. Jekyl, and a Dr. Jeckyl. George Eliot is sometimes an Eliott, an Elliot, and an Elliott -- but she made up the name anyway, so why shouldn't we modify it a little bit at will? My favorite, though, was seeing new versions of my own name crop up on the fronts of blue books: "Kevin Shapiro," for example, or "Meier." Really I'm in no position to tease: a couple years ago I wrote a 20-page essay for MOR that referred regularly to Edmund Casaubon.

Gradedown! Post 3

A few more hebdomadals down, and the alterna-essay:

• 47 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

I'm being too indulgent with these, aren't I?

Here are some quick statistics about peer review. The average grade increase from Essay 1 to Essay 2 was 0.43 percent. The essay grades of students who peer-reviewed their essays went up, on average, 3.0 percent: an impressive difference amounting to about a third of a letter grade. The most impressive datum, though, is how amazingly effective star reviewers were -- those five peer reviewers who earned mondo extra credit for putting serious thought and time into peer-reviewing their peers' work. Students whose second essays were peer reviewed by these star reviewers saw grade increases of 8.9 percent: basically a full letter grade. That is seriously, seriously amazing stuff.

Remember that when I graded these second essays, I didn't even glance at the peer reviews: in most cases I didn't know that an essay had been peer reviewed at all.

Thank you, peer reviewers, for making essays on average 3% more pleasant to read. I hope you all keep at it: the statistics here seem to show that a couple hours spent working through a peer's critical comments can boost your grade massively. Massively.

Gradedown! Post 2

Just took care of the peer reviews and one of the hebdomadals, leaving me with

• 1 alterna-essay
• 51 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

Here are some interesting things I noticed about the IDs on the final exam:

1. If you were an economist -- and maybe some of you are, actually -- If I were an economist, I would have expected students to approach IDs beginning with the passages about which they felt most confident and proceeding on to passages and texts about which they felt less confident. If a student was only sure about, say, four texts, s/he would take an educated stab at a fifth text. If this hypothesis were right, ID grades would begin high and get lower as the student proceeded. What I noticed, though, was that for most students grades went in the opposite direction -- except in cases where you had to guess at a passage, you more or less improved as you got more practice writing out IDs. What this tells me is that practice really pays -- maybe next semester I will more strenuously urge students to work through several full IDs in the days before the exam.

2. Something I hadn't thought of before: Tristen (306) used the IDs not merely to talk through the thematic problems of the texts but to connect those texts to thematic problems in other texts. It was really smart work, I think, saying that texts could be identified not merely in isolation but also as parts of a larger discourse. That was pretty cool, and I urge all of you to steal Tristen's idea if you take ID-based exams in the future.

3. Whether or not you guys liked a text had little bearing on how well you identified it. This is strange to me -- it's an axiom in literary instruction that getting students to like literature is the entire battle: once they like a text, they will have little trouble working with it. Yet though Disgrace was the massive favorite -- at least according to Friday's quiz-poll -- the average ID score for passage #3 was 4.8/6; IDs of Endgame (passage #4), the second-least-favorite text according to Friday's poll, averaged exactly the same score. While Heart of Darkness had no votes as favorite text and 2 as least favorite, the average grade for HoD IDs (passage #8) was a massive 5.3/6. Here's the breakdown, organized by passage number:

1. Arcadia (3 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 7 answers; mean score 4.3
2. The Waste Land (2 votes as favorite; 3 votes as least favorite): 20 answers; mean score 4.8
3. Disgrace (8 votes as favorite): 30 answers, mean grade 4.8
4. Endgame (5 votes as least favorite): 12 answers; mean grade 4.8
5. "Araby" (2 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 31 answers; mean grade 4.7
6. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1 vote as least favorite): 25 answers; mean grade 4.8
7. Middlemarch (6 votes as favorite; 7 votes as least favorite): 8 answers, mean grade 4.1
8. Heart of Darkness (2 votes as least favorite): 22 answers; mean grade 5.3
9. To the Lighthouse (2 votes as favorite; 5 votes as least favorite): 10 answers; mean grade 4.6

I promise to get back to grading later tonight... well, whether I promise or not clearly it has to get done. I will probably regale you with a later post articulating some thoughts about peer review (the numbers here are interesting). A little bit later -- maybe after I finish grading; maybe as a reward for getting through some of the exam essays -- I'll write a little bit about next steps for you guys: continuing education, and all that.

Gradedown! Post 1

After the exam today, MOR gave us a grades-in deadline of the 22nd. I'll be posting here for the next few days to motivate myself to keep going -- it's not that I imagine you care; it's that I need something to do with my life other than grading and packing.

I managed to get all the IDs done this afternoon, so here's what I have left to grade:

• One alterna-essay
• 52 hebdomadals
• 9 peer reviews
• 66 exam essays

I don't want to work out the averages here, but I'm thinking that 10 hebdomadals a day should be manageable, although that will be on top of... what? 18 exam essays a day? Don't get me wrong: I am completely in love with this job; there's something about grading, though, that's somewhat overwhelming.