Thoughts on grading midterms

[brigdh]

1. How do you not know the name of your own species?! We said again and again and again that only modern humans ever lived in the Americas, so if I have to read one more essay about the migration of Homo erectus into Canada, I will hunt these people down and kill them in their sleep. Yes.

2. Mexico is not in South America. No, really. I don't care how many people write this down, it is still not true.

3. Similarly, New Zealand is not and has never been part of Australia.

4. Jesus Christ, people, mammoths have nothing to do with the beginnings of farming. Where did you even get this theory from?

5. No, Australia was not first inhabited "just before WWII".

6. WTF.

ETA: 7. The end of the Ice Age != end of the world.

Comments

[fadagaski.livejournal.com]

How old are your students? Please tell me they're under the age of 12.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

No! College students! And with a very small proportion of freshmen, even! I weep.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's ... special. The owrst I remember from my TA days was a lovely young woman who attended only the first hour of every two-hour lecture class, and then had the gall to complain about her well-earned C on the midterm.

She was using the second hour to do homework for other classes. Why? Because she was apparently working three jobs to afford school and therefore deserved an A. Note that this was a private university that did not have a reputation like that of Harvard, where just the name on the diploma would be worth the money. And that a decent state university was in the same city. She said that it was OK to not attend the second hour ebcause the broad outlines were given in the first hour and the second hour was only detail. I pointed out she got her C because she didn't know the details.

She told me she was a business major and had only taken intro to anthro because she heard it was an easy A and she therefore deserved an A. (It was, provided you, say, attended class.)

She also told me, when challenging one of the questions I'd marked wrong, that women had equal status to men in agricultural societies because she grew up on a farm and the women had equal status. *twitch*

Her C stood.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I think I had that same woman on the last midterm! She too got a C, and argued with me about it for 45 minutes, then went to the professor and argued for a similar amount of time, and then came back to me and argued for some more. This despite the fact that she began her essay with an incorrect statement and continued in a similar vein.

Thankfully I am not grading her test this time.

The sense of entitlement of some people is really impressive.

[threewalls]

It wasn't even first inhabited by 'white people' just before WWII. But, yes, grading papers. I feel your pain. What year are they?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the sympathy.

All years of undergrad, though a greater proportion of upper years (which surprised me, given that it's an intro class).

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

WTF indeed. Your poor brain!

Thanks to number 4, though, I now have a wonderful mental image of some poor man trying to hitch a mammoth to a plow.

[rm.livejournal.com]

HitchAMammothToAPlow.com would be a hillarious domain name for tales of horror from TA'ing.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha, awesome.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

1. Good God.

2. I was under the impression that this was a fairly selective school. I'd be willing to listen respectfully to an argument that the world is not coming to an end merely because your students don't know these specific facts, that perhaps they know other things that compensate in the general-knowledge arena. But sadly, that wouldn't excuse the fact that they evidently don't know how to look things up, which ought to be basic whatever set of common-knowledge stuff you grew up with.

3. Also, the location of Mexico, at least, ought to be common knowledge. If it were in South America, why would Those Idiots be spending our money on building a big fence?

4. Mammoths? Mammoths???

5. I guess Kipling called it. 'Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/is one with Ninevah and Tyre!'

6. WTF. WTF??

7. It doesn't? You mean, we're not all ghosts, haunting a ruined Earth? Coulda totally fooled me!

8. Because you can't say it often enough for this situation: WTF??

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I never had a problem with news articles decrying the lack of geography classes today, since it's a subject I've always found incredibly boring. And yet, if this the typical understanding of basic geography, maybe we need to make people sit through a couple of years and memorizing capitals and locations.

I think, in fact, Those Idiots are part of what's contributing to all the "Mexico is in South America" comments. Because, you see, those Mexicans are foreigners! They're not like us! They couldn't be North Americans!

I just can't comprehend the end of the world comment. The handwriting on that test is particularly bad, so I'm hoping I misread it, but I couldn't come up with anything else that would make grammatical sense with the rest of the sentence (logical sense, of course, having already being given up).

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Obviously North America ends at the US/Mexico border. Duh.

Even the Mexicans confirm this to a certain extent, IIRC: pejorative slang for US-ers is norteamericanos. Which is not to excuse it in an american undergraduate student. no.

[veleda-k.livejournal.com]

That...that's a whole new level of stupid. How can college students possibly be so stupid? How can one graduate from an American high school without knowing that Mexico is not part of South America?

I've heard that a significant portion of high school graduates couldn't pass the GED exam. I believe it.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I know! It seems impossible.

But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if a great deal of these people wouldn't pass the GED.

[graene.livejournal.com]

And I whine about what I'm given? Please tell me you feel free to splash the red ink around? I feel inhibited because of the 'tender age and ego' of my students, but then they don't deserve it nearly as much.

Home schooling continues to strike me as a more appealing option every day.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

My professor has vowed to back me and the other TA up on any grades we give, and has ranted about students who think they're entitled to an A just because they studied, so I am happily allowed to take off all kinds of points.

Home schooling certainly would improve educational standards, but- at least in my experience- often seems to result in weird socialization.

WTF

[beemerbike.livejournal.com]

The moron who gave them money to go to college needs to ask for a refund. The problem is most only think about being with people who are erect or are the people who are erect.

I bet every one of them passed those stupid 'no child left behind' exams, too.

GRRR!

Re: WTF

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Dude, for real. She described them particularly as "modern homo erectus", which is a really awesome oxymoron.

I'm sure they did; those exams don't show anything.

[miep.livejournal.com]

maybe they read this page and were confused:

http://www.newser.com/tag/12577-1.html

[beemerbike.livejournal.com]

u didn't.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

My favorite ever, from a paper corrected by Sherwood Smith: "And then the hand of fate stepped in."

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ha! I love that.

[gen50.livejournal.com]

i know why they think mexico is in south america.
it's because they can speak spanish-
and a lot of southern american countries are some variation of spanish.
ergo they must be in south america.

taken that way, perhaps that would be .... logical?
if in a sort of limited sense.

i hate geography with a passion.
i confuse west and east (i have to look at my hands to know left and right)
so geography is a subject i hate.
still i do look up the countries every now and then.
just so i dont mistake them.

but i did very well in my anthro class. i got 1.5 i think.
(our grading system is not A-c, but rather numeric 1-5, 1 being perfect,
your A++, 2 is satisfactory, 3 is passing, 4 is conditional failure, and 5 is a fail)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sure that's where the assumption that Mexico is in South America is coming from, but it bothers me, because it's a mistake that validates particular ideas of Us vs Them that Mexico already has too much of.

I don't expect anyone to know perfect geography- there was an internet quiz going around a few weeks ago about naming countries that I did horrible on, but when something's been shown to you on maps and talked about multiple times, you'd think people could at least put it on the right continent.

Made of Fail

[pukingtoreador.livejournal.com]

The darkness drops again...

Re: Made of Fail

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

For real!

[cellophane_ria.livejournal.com]

Lol. I'm sending my deepest sympathy.
And now I don't feel so bad for wanting to raise the grade to the max when one of the students designing a book cover/layout chose The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, not the obligatory Paolo Coelho/living manual. *cringes*

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hee, thank you.

Yeah! Willingness to go outside the requirements should totally be rewarded.

[parallactic.livejournal.com]

3. I always thought New Zealand is part of Australia the way England is part of Europe and Japan is part of Asia. This could be due to how globes and maps give an inappropriate sense of scale.

7. What, don't these students ever watch terrible Hollywood movies, and/or repetitive movie commercials, about twee talking animals surviving the ice age? That's a gimme even without paying attention in school.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Re 3. I wouldn't have had a problem with that. This student meant "part of Australia" in the sense that one could walk from one to another without, you know, going underwater.

7. Yeah! Or the fact that the world seems to currently exist. At least in my experience.

[kessie.livejournal.com]

You know every time I think I'm dumb and going for my masters was a mistake... there are always worse.

(Yes, I am having doubts about going for a PhD. Granted, I could go better than the students you're grading, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

You are an amazing improvement over my students. I think if it's what you want, you should go for a PhD. I think you'd do excellently, and are more than capable of it.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I know I'm going to regret asking this, but-- tell me this is at least a variety of courses you're grading?

#4. LOL.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Nope, all one. Just one test, even, so it's not like I've been accumulating stupid things over the course of the semester.

[sociallyawkrd.livejournal.com]

This amused me. But then I went to college where we had a teacher who taught that dinosaurs were used by man to do farm work. You know like plow up the Garden of Eden.

Stupid people scare me.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Dude, wow. Where did you go to college?

[redshoeson.livejournal.com]

2. In defense of the writer, I thought it was, too.

3. Ditto...

Clearly I fail your class. ^^;;

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well, it's a bit more annoyance-inducing when we've been showing maps constantly for the last month.