4 juillet 2012
Academics need to spend more time teaching and less time marking
If the job of the academic is to educate, grading must be kept in check. In what ways can you reduce the burden of examining?
Like most 'elite' universities, LSE assesses students by three hour, unseen, hand written exams. Each year our students typically get 160 hours of contact teaching time, and are examined for 12 hours. We double blind mark second and third year scripts, and justify the mark in writing. I typically write 80 to 100 words per essay, or 250 to 300 per script. Some colleagues write more, some less, but marking is not a trivial exercise. You are doing well to mark more than three scripts per hour, and then of course you have to reconcile the marks at the end. You can't just take an average!
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