RBOC Grading Jail Edition

• So I had two very interesting lunches this week with colleagues that I'll get around to blogging.. hmm over the weekend maybe. I want to process what I think happened at each one.

• My 3rd year review apparently went well. I won't know this for sure until next week either.

• I made an announcement today about professionalism in email because I had two different students flip out in email at me in the last week over VERY MINOR grade issues (along the lines of I don't even know why this was assigned anyway, but the grading was totally unfair and I absolutely can't imagine what you or the TA was thinking etc. etc.), two emails from random addresses with no name, and one that used IM abbreviations so much I couldn't figure out what they meant without googling the abbreviations. So get this, one of the students realized I was refering to her and apologized! Wow!

• I am in grading jail. I gave an exam last wed and promised students to return the exams in labs Thurs & Fri. I have graded 62 of 80 papers. I have to finish by 1:30 tomorrow. I can, but I don't want to.
  

• I can't tell you some of the funniest things from the exams without revealing field. But students are really funny when they don't know the answer and brain dump onto the page. Oh, I can tell one... We illicited things from subjects in our experiment....

• My grade distribution is currently 9 A, 20 B, 9 C, 14 D, 12 F. I expect most of the next 20 will end up in the B/D range from skimming short answer responses. Clearly the test was way freaking hard. Usually the distribution is more like 20 A, 20 B, 15C, misc D/F. If I curve so that the highest student get a perfect score, the distribution is: 19 A, 13 B, 14 C, 8 D, 5 F. Do I curve? For what it's worth the D students really didn't get it, but clearly many of them were almost C students and many of the B students were almost A students.
  

• I provide lots of small participation type grades on which students typically get perfect scores (a for effort and all that). Does that change your answer to curving?