This is incredibly different from the way it’s done at the US and Israel (I’ve taught at Harvard and Hebrew U), where exams are graded by grad-students TA, and certainly no more than one grader each exam.
This leads to a temptation to grading by one’s own own highly informal curve, as well as to extreme grade inflation in top US universities.
The UK way is far better, except for the lack of feedback.
The UK way is far better, except for the lack of feedback.
The UK system does not prevent grade inflation for fairly obvious reasons. Whether a full second round of grading happens depends on the department and the class.
As a professor at the University of Rochester in New York (private university) when I taught intro to programming to engineers with ~150 in my class, grading was done by a team of graduate student TAs that I supervised. I wrote the exam, I taught the class, and I supervised the grading giving pretty explicit instructions on each problem how to grade it and grading them all together so questions could be addressed in real time.
Essentially it was me grading the exams, but supervising a team.
The remarkable thing to me was there were no foral checks and balances on either the quality of my teaching or the quality of my grading. This was true the entire 8 years I taught there, and I think is completely typical of US higher education.
Thanks for those details!
This is incredibly different from the way it’s done at the US and Israel (I’ve taught at Harvard and Hebrew U), where exams are graded by grad-students TA, and certainly no more than one grader each exam.
This leads to a temptation to grading by one’s own own highly informal curve, as well as to extreme grade inflation in top US universities.
The UK way is far better, except for the lack of feedback.
The UK system does not prevent grade inflation for fairly obvious reasons. Whether a full second round of grading happens depends on the department and the class.
As a professor at the University of Rochester in New York (private university) when I taught intro to programming to engineers with ~150 in my class, grading was done by a team of graduate student TAs that I supervised. I wrote the exam, I taught the class, and I supervised the grading giving pretty explicit instructions on each problem how to grade it and grading them all together so questions could be addressed in real time.
Essentially it was me grading the exams, but supervising a team.
The remarkable thing to me was there were no foral checks and balances on either the quality of my teaching or the quality of my grading. This was true the entire 8 years I taught there, and I think is completely typical of US higher education.