When teaching is done, marking takes over. The academic year tends to end with a pile of first- and second-year essays, and undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations, and exams. It can be a lot! And we must return grades within four working weeks, but also, all grades have to be in before the exam board meetings. They must! Grades that have not been verified in these meetings don’t count, and could lead to students not graduating in summer. So some of the turn-around times are therefore shorter.
With all that marking comes a lot of academic integrity work, of course. Luckily, that remained fairly modest, for now at least. Not as much in the dissertations as in the second year essays. And the exam cases will still be coming in.
To make things worse, we had an Away Day the day before I would leave. So that was a day I could not dedicate to marking and whatever comes with that. I also needed to prepare for it. And I had accidentally booked my travel over the marking deadline of the dissertations. Which I am responsible for. Oops! So it was a busy time before I travelled. I thought I had marked all my dissertations on time, but there was one that was submitted late. I had assumed that was a non-submission, but that was wrong. I marked that one on the train to London…
A complication, or maybe a saving grace, was that we’re not allowed to release grades on a Friday, and the four week deadline fell on a Friday. That Monday was a bank holiday Monday. So basically the deadline wasn’t actually on a Friday, but the Tuesday after. That helped. But that Tuesday I would be on a train all day. And I was reluctant to hang my work laptop from a public (train) network. I would have to do what I had to do on my phone!
I should have spent more time preparing my trip, but I felt responsible for all the marking. It was a bit hectic, and not all was sorted, but I think it will be OK. I will have to hit the ground running when I get back to round everything off, not quite on time, but sort of on time-ish!
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