#i profess

jadagul:

The actual physical act of entering grades is surprisingly draining.

Like, grading tests takes a lot of energy; that’s infamous true and rarely surprising. But once I have all the grades, and have my spreadsheet that says “John Smith gets a C and Mary Elizabeth gets a B+”, it is exhausting to actually enter those into the computer system.

Because I have a list of seventy names in alphabetical order, and for each of them I have to access a pulldown menu and select the correct grade from about fifteen options. And there is no possible source of sanity checks to this process because I’m the only one who knows anything about what grades people should get; and it’s a real problem if I accidentally click on the wrong option.

(And then the interface I have to enter stuff into doesn’t actually make it easy to see which box corresponds to which student.)

So it’s a high-stakes, high-pressure exercise in hand-copying data from one form to another form, when the second form is awkward to interact with and also hard to read. When I finish my brain and my eyes both hurt.

(And yes, obviously, this problem would not exist if I could just upload a spreadsheet into the system. I cannot.)

evilsoup

Could you ask a colleague to double-check your work?

You can only save entered data by submitting grades, and the form times out after fifteen minutes.

(also I’m doing it from home at four in the morning, but that one’s my fault.)

The actual physical act of entering grades is surprisingly draining.

Like, grading tests takes a lot of energy; that’s infamous true and rarely surprising. But once I have all the grades, and have my spreadsheet that says “John Smith gets a C and Mary Elizabeth gets a B+”, it is exhausting to actually enter those into the computer system.

Because I have a list of seventy names in alphabetical order, and for each of them I have to access a pulldown menu and select the correct grade from about fifteen options. And there is no possible source of sanity checks to this process because I’m the only one who knows anything about what grades people should get; and it’s a real problem if I accidentally click on the wrong option.

(And then the interface I have to enter stuff into doesn’t actually make it easy to see which box corresponds to which student.)

So it’s a high-stakes, high-pressure exercise in hand-copying data from one form to another form, when the second form is awkward to interact with and also hard to read. When I finish my brain and my eyes both hurt.

(And yes, obviously, this problem would not exist if I could just upload a spreadsheet into the system. I cannot.)

kata4a:

on a train. guy sitting in the seat across from me is typing on a laptop. takes out a calculator, keys in some numbers. returns to typing on the laptop

At my old job, the calculus classes I taught included a computer lab portion. So I taught them all mathematica, and we did a bunch of exploratory calculus exercises that used mathematica to do things like plot graphs and look at what happens if you change bits of the function.

And then sometimes they’d need to do a calculation, and they’d pull out their graphing calculators to get an answer and type that answer into mathematica. And it drove me nuts.

loki-zen:

galois-groupie:

harping on about standardized tests seems like it’s kinda missing the point. I don’t see how tests being standardized is the big problem here.

I guess it’s a way of mobilising around/talking about the stuff that forms the bulk of the problem in reality without bundling that with the more extreme stance of being against test-like forms of (summative?) assessment altogether

Yeah, I think it’s bundling a few things together. (Note also that “standardized testing” can mean things like the SAT, but can also mean the 2-3 day battery of tests students take at the end of the year, in some states every year; I think the latter gets more general population ire than the former.)

1. Some people don’t like the whole idea of testing and grades to begin with, but they’re a minority.
2. A somewhat larger group doesn’t like measuring outcomes in ways that can be compared between teachers or schools. Sometimes because teachers don’t like feeling like people are looking over their shoulder, sometimes because there are real consequences attached to it that can feel somewhat random, and sometimes because people don’t like what the measurements reveal.
3. (The Kendi-ist contretemps about how standardized testing is racist is a subpoint of the previous point. Black students perform worse on standardized tests than white students. No one likes thinking about the implications there, so it’s easy to blame the tests.)
4. Standardized testing is annoying because it turns like three days of the school year into this ordeal that stresses everyone out.
5. This sort of standardized testing is also relatively new; my parents mostly didn’t experience it. So it’s easier to complain about.
6. Standardized tests aren’t responsive to what teachers choose to cover, so they’re more likely to drive teaching to the test. (You can’t “test to the teach”, which is what I prefer to do.)