Marking update

It started with the big and the small piles of marking. I decided to get the small one out of the way first. And in two days, I had marked everything that had been uploaded. That was only about 2/3 of the cohort, as the rest had extensions. But it felt good to get to the end of the list as it was. I decided to not publish anything until the people with the extensions had submitted too. 

With the second batch almost coming in, I got my skates on and did the assignment myself. This is the one that is based on the field trip, so every year has different data. I have to process that as much as the students do! But I have done it before, so for me it is quite quick. Especially since I found a way of doing it in R rather than in Excel.

Before I started on the second batch I tried to make a dent into the assignment of the big cohort. It is not in itself a big assignment, but if you have to mark 100 scripts, it still takes a lot of time. And if you try to do them all in succession you go bonkers! So my strategy was to sometimes do a limited number. 

By the end of that week I had marked the entire small batch, including extensions. I hadn't made any progress on the big batch at all! Or the intermediate one. But I had spent a lot of time on the allocation; this gets its own blog post. And I had been away for two days, on a first aid course, and a day in the field. So I was quite satisfied altogether. The week after, I would have to get a big lump out of the other marking done!

 

There is an age-depth model in the small assignment. This is an example from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 322 Preliminary Report, doi:10.2204/iodp.pr.322.2009