Teacher memories..

Back when I was instructor at a public tech school....

Grading tests for 50 students.  100% slog for an instructor, no other way to describe it.  Also a wildly wasteful loss of opportunity.  I came up with a better way to deal with it.

The class (50-ish) students took their test.  I usually capped it at 50 question, with 30 being more typical.  The questions were straight from the textbook and lessons, so they had every chance to study the material.  Taking the test... all as normal (Except I NEVER gave IU13 the answers and made them do the work too).

Grading we did MY way.  The tests were gathered and then passed back out.  Each student had to write their name on the back of the test they graded, so we could track any slackers who didn't take it seriously.

We went through the test FAST.  "1 is A, 2 is C, 3 is A" etc.  The students just put a mark next to each question with a wrong answer.  

Then we went through again, and I simply called out question numbers in order.  Again, fast.  No time to screw around with the process.   As I hit a question with an incorrect answer, the students would pop their hand into the air.  If most of them got it right, I didn't do anything.  If more than 10-15 hands went up, I made a check next to that question.

Then I went over every question with too many wrong answers.  The point of this was fairly simple.  I examined the question WITH the students.  They could argue the question was faulty, or the material was not well covered, and I took them seriously.  If they could convince me I was at fault, the question was removed from consideration and got a pass on the grade.  At the end, I had them add up the number wrong a second time and not it on the front of the test, crossing out the first score.  Students then got their test back to see the score, before I collected them.  At that point they had one last chance to argue a question.

There were usually at least one or two questions that got deleted from the test score each time.  Why did I do this?

1)  Hey, I make mistakes too.  It's only fair the students can call me out.

2) They had to know the material to make the argument. They liked proving me wrong more than they liked studying, so they made the effort.

3) Discussing the questions after the test gave one more chance to cover the material and enhance understanding.

To be honest, I made sure there were at least a couple bad questions on every test.  The process was too valuable not to.