The marking conundrum

So it turns out that some people didn't even try to bring any objects in or even write a lesson plan!  One of my friends in the program actually heard someone say, "They'll pass me anyway so I don't see why I need to stress about this kinda stuff."  Wow.

In any case what other people are or aren't doing doesn't really effect me until group work comes along.  In the meantime I think my lesson plan went pretty well! In our small group I had examples of paper planes that mimicked hang gliders and others that looked more like jets.  I threw them around the class and encourage the audience to brainstorm ideas about air and what traits made a good or bad flyer.  The assignment focused on the beginning of the lesson and how we'd follow that with a hands on activity, etc and I think I achieved that.  Overall I was happy :)

Shortly after science we headed to our next lecture where they brought up an important issue in teaching...subjectivity.  Everyone in the lecture hall was given a grade 8 student's work sheet with answers from a spelling test.  We were not given the answer key and asked to mark it out of 25.  The cursive was really a mess and everyone was having a hard time going through it.  Afterward a mini poll was conducted and on average the mark the student got varied from "unknown" right to 21/ 25.  The point was clear: we all have our reasons for marking the way we do but in the end the student is the recipient of these variations even in a population with similar academic goals.

Afterward we were given the answer key.  After re-marking, the range narrowed but only from 12 to 23/25.  Other things we realized after we had finished marking: the answer key itself had errors, there were actually only 24 words not 25, even with the answer key some letters were hard to discern, and this theoretically was only one test out of 30 students in the class.

So many issues on how our personal teaching philosophies, styles and choices on things like spelling, full marks, partial marks, penmanship had HUGE ramifications on the success, confidence and grades of the student.  Everyone had their own valid but personal reasons for marking the way they did, and yet depending on which teacher this kid had on any given day...he could have been given anything between a fail to an A.

The layers just keep coming and I'm realizing that the responsibility is so much greater than I could have ever expected :S  Just a little scary... Oh and I almost forgot to mention: the individual that was writing as the grade eight student was one of the professors... and even though he had chicken scratch writing, all of the words were spelled correctly.