It had been a busy week! It shouldn't have been; it was the first week after the end of term. Normally you start marking then. But this week that did not take place!
On Friday, one of my colleagues who had second marked the dissertation of one of my students let me know he was ready to agree a grade. I confessed I hadn't even started! I said that if only students would just stop copying phrases over from scientific literature, and from less reputable sources, use AI to write their assignments, copy exams over from each other or assignments from themselves, and all things like that, I would've had time to get some marking done. He replied that if only they would stop asking for extensions he would've made a lot more progress than he actually had as well! And I know how terribly many he gets. And he has to give all of them proper attention.
I suppose if I would be an efficiency machine maybe I could have made a bit of a start! But I had a lot of meetings, and a lot of my time was indeed stuff to do with academic integrity. I saw three students, emailed seven others that I intended to penalise them, referred one to the higher authorities, and decided to leave six off the hook. And I also had to properly document all of that. I don't think it should be this busy! But it is.
There were other things going on as well, of course! I am discussing a television programme about sea level rise with S4C, and possible shared MSc projects with NRW. I am communicating with my two master students, and am involved in the progress meetings of other people’s students. I needed to remind the staff that they need to make sure all the grades for the dissertation presentations are documented, and I need to check which grades are not in yet, and why. I also had to restore the spreadsheet where they are documented as someone had made a dog’s breakfast of it. And I had to dig out a model answer for an exam as it seemed to have gone missing. And I needed to get my exam for my Earth, Climate and Evolution module ready. I had been waiting for comments from the External Examiners, but if these would have comments, they would have delivered them by now. I could clearly make the changes we had suggested!
There were also meetings with the University Athena Swan team (and negotiations with the Head of School on how to create our own team) and with the new Vice Chancellor, and with a lady from Learning Technologies about changing the way the dissertation students log their progress, and with the Teaching and Scholarship team.
It was only a four day week! And it seemed to just fly by. I really hope that next week I can make a serious dent in the outstanding marking!
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