Hitting the ground running at work

The students were supposed to get their dissertation marks back on Tuesday. That Tuesday I spent travelling. So I knew that in order to keep the damage of being late within limits, I would have to snap into action that Wednesday morning. So when I got home at about 11 pm on Tuesday I basically threw my bag into a corner, cuddled the cat, showered the train smell off me and went to bed. And the next morning I was in the home office straight after breakfast.

I released the grades, chased up all staff who hadn't quite uploaded all their grades, and alerted the students to the situation. I also had to finish my exam marking; that exam hadn't been anywhere near four weeks ago, which is the normal amount of time you get for marking, but we need to have the grades in for exam board meetings anyway. So that was next. I also had to upload grades and feedback for my master student, whose thesis I had marked on the train.

I also had academic integrity cases flooding in by now! I think quite some people were on a last-minute marking spree, with the deadline for grades for graduating students so close. And that meant there wasn't much time for them to finish it, and even less for me to deal with any cases of academic poor practice (or malpractice) they came across. There is no reason why you can't check for academic poor practice first, and mark later, but in practice, that is clearly not how it tends to work. So I had to be straight back on it. Get as many of these cases out of the way as I could! And the marking deadline for all other students was only a week later, so until then I would have my work cut out. And after that? Well! Only a few days for other things, and then I would be off to Finland. And in these days I still have enough to do!

After Finland I might be able to tackle some of the bigger projects I have on my to-do list. Such as: writing a case study for my application as senior fellow of the HEA, making a new statistics practical for the dissertation students, and do all the processing and plotting in my other modules, that I have so far done in Excel, in R. I don't have to worry about being bored!