The Rites of Exam Grading

Students juggle due dates and test times this month, but the deadlines don’t end once those three-hour exams are turned in—at least not for professors and teaching fellows.

While students can jet off for an intersession vacation, their instructors face piles of exams and hours of grading before they submit final grades to the Registrar.

For classes with hundreds of students or those with a late exam, the task of grading can seem daunting. Professors and TFs have established their own rites and strategies to ease the process.

“I actually enjoy this sort of collective labor, as miserable as it could be,” said history professor Laurel T. Ulrich.

PUTTING THE ‘FUN’ IN FINALS

With the Registrar sometimes requiring final grades less than a week after the completion of an exam, courses face a tight turnaround for completing grading.

Ulrich said she surmounts this barrier by tackling the grading immediately after students finish the final.

“We would go someplace, get a lot of junk food, maybe some pizza, and we would each take one question,” Ulrich said of grading exams with her TFs for larger courses.

“We would spend, sometimes, into the wee hours,” she added.

Ulrich, who is teaching a freshman seminar and the history department’s sophomore tutorial this semester, has traditionally taught a big Core course each year. Most recently, she taught Historical Studies B-40, “Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives in Revolutionary America.”

Chemistry 17, “Principles of Organic Chemistry,” also relies on the collective experience of grading—the 14 TFs will gather today to grade this morning’s exam. The class boasts an enrollment of 229 undergraduates and the task is likely to take five to six hours, said Walter E. Kowtoniuk, the head TF.

But even sharing in the common experience of grading does not always make the process less tedious.

“It’s not terribly enjoyable,” Kowtoniuk said. “All of the TFs for the chemistry department are grad students, so it takes us away from our research for an afternoon.”

But he added, “It is an informal experience, so we do make jokes.”

Thomas F. Kelly, the professor for the popular Core course Literature and Arts B-51, “First Nights: Five Performance Premieres,” said his teaching staff sometimes makes grading more enjoyable by sharing funny stories.

“If some student gets a totally hilariously wrong answer, then sometimes, completely anonymously, the TFs will copy that answer from the exam and send it around to the TFs,” said Kelly, whose 187-student class had its exam yesterday.

Many courses reward their TFs for non-stop hours of exam grading by throwing a party at the end.

Literature and Arts C-14, “The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization,” is planning such party, according the head TF Peter A. O’Connell.

A WINNING STRATEGY

Professors and TFs point out that distributing the bluebooks among TFs and developing a guideline for assigning grades are critical for speeding along the grading process.

In Moral Reasoning 22, “Justice”—a Core course with 1,072 undergraduates—the 31 TFs convene with government professor Michael J. Sandel to discuss grading standards and then distribute exams to students’ respective TFs.

“We get together in a big room and start making big piles and sorting students according to who their TF is,” said Michael J. Kessler, the assistant head TF for the course. “It has a certain kind of stock market feel to it.”

“For many TFs, you lock yourself in the office and grade for a couple of days until they are done,” said former Justice head TF Andrew Schroeder.

While Justice TFs grade only the exams for their own sections, other courses have several TFs grade each exam.

The exam for First Nights is divided into five parts, and teams of TFs grade specific sections of the exam.

“It is the only time that student work gets graded across the course rather than by his or her individual TF,” Kelly said.

While Ulrich said she enjoys the “nitty-gritty grading,” other professors appreciate the perks of their position.

“I don’t read a set of 100 exams, that is one of the good things about being the professor,” Kelly said. “But I’m involved in it.”

—Staff Writer Madeline W. Lissner can be reached at mlissner@fas.harvard.edu.