June 2nd 2007 – 17:56 – Home
I have just finished marking final exam papers. It has been a long marathon of boring readings and markings. Reading the same answer eighty times and putting a similar mark beside the answer all the time is a sort of torture as well. However I have no right to complain about marking since it is part of my job and it is an indispensable thing in terms of assessment. In fact marking exam papers can also be fun sometimes!
Last night I worked until 1 am so that I can leave only 10 more papers to today. I did! Although lots of distraction tried to stop me and I was so tempted to take action against my own targets, I achieved to stay awake until 1 am. I realized that the speed of marking is decreasing by the elapsing time. If I mark five papers in the first one hour, then in the second hour this number drops to four or even three. The third one hour period might yield one or two papers at all. The main reason for the deceleration must be exhaustion due to the reading same things over and over and paying attention to the grammatically wrong sentences or algebraically inconsistent mathematical equations. I did not deduct any point for the grammar mistakes as long as the sentence is semantically correct and gives me the right idea. I cannot blame students for the grammar mistakes they did since it is their second language. I would not be able to imagine myself taking a Statistics exam in Vietnamese! I would definitely fail! While marking papers and noting the most common mistakes, I also fabricated possible errors I have had in my recent IELTS test. I talked about the “inflection” point for an analysis of a graph. What if I spelled “inflection” wrong and made a big mess about the statistical analysis… A sentence like “The inflection on the curve stops her (UK) to reach the climax point” can easily turn to “An infection on the curve stops her to reach the climax point” or “An injection on the curve stops her to reach the climax point” …
One can have fun with marking! It is not easy but still not impossible! When I woke up today morning at 8 am, even before having my simple breakfast of eggs, bread and coffee, I wanted to mark a few more papers. It might be good to start the day with marking. Why not! It is a mental exercise and it opens up one’s mind in terms of finding errors and being just. After getting to bed at 1 am last night, I could not sleep well. I was marking papers all night, correcting, ticking on the papers, writing notes on another paper, crossing out, laughing at funny answers, and drawing hanging man beside a wrong answer, hesitating to give an extra five points for a partially correct answer, crying while seeing the sum of all points does not reach up to 50% and even talking with the owner of the exam paper. It lasted all night and it was really colorful. These things happen to me a lot! Whatever I work on before sleeping, I continue doing it all night during my sleep. When I used to work on school timetables for the high school I worked in Bangkok, whenever I stop working in the evening and went to bed straight, all night I continued playing with Excel boxes and colors assigned to each teacher on the spreadsheet. It was like playing Tetris and suddenly when you close your eyes, those shapes don’t stop dropping from the ceiling. Hopefully I am not a narcoleptic! I can still differentiate the dreams from reality and when I wake up I know where the movie ended. Sometimes I also believe that every good writer must be a little bit narcoleptic. He or she must believe that dreams are true so that he or she can make others believe his/her dreams are real and why he/she wrote them as if they are real. A good novel is nothing more than an attempt to convince others that your dreams are true. Especially South American writers are more closed to this kind of definition. They write their dreams with an enormous power that the dream or the magic becomes real. That is why we call Latin American literature as “magical realism”. Who can stay untouched after reading “One Hundred years of Solitude” or “Blindness”. Although they look like dreams or imaginations, they are actually as real as Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” or Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”. Anyway, in this case being narcoleptic is not as good as being a writer! Imagine that I dream I have finished marking, entered all the exam scores to the grading sheet and did the moderation. Then next morning I am at the airport waiting for the flight which will take me to white sands of Ko Chang! But in real, nothing is completed! Dream is dream, real is real! Time to wake up! I don’t want to be embarrassed like Sarah in Jonathan Coe’s novel “House of Sleep”. She thought she moved the footnotes from the article but actually it was all dream. Next month her boyfriend lost his job and the magazine he worked has been sued by Pope, prince of England and four more influential figures. It was all because of her narcolepsy. Funny ending though, a little bit cruel for Sarah!
After having breakfast I put one of the Mozart CDs to the player. It was Marriage of Figaro at the beginning. I said to myself “what a good start!” and continued my fight with papers. One of the most amazing mistakes done by students is logical inconsistency. Most of my students think that “if A then B” is equivalent to “if not A then not B”. I don’t know where they got this idea from but this wrong logical implication cost them a lot. They also kept making mistake of “assuming” the normality of population. Even though the question clearly says that the population is normal, they want to assume it! This must be effect of memorizing the sentences instead of understanding them. They don’t want to accept the fact! Assuming may sound better for some but not in this case. Besides this, almost 30% of my student spelled “assume” as “assumpt”. If I had different variations, I would think that they don’t know how to spell “assume” but there was no any other kind of misspelling. Either “assume” or “assumpt” were all on the papers. I wondered that they studied same notes or same book which leads them to this misspelling… How can we explain this? There must be other ways to misspell a word, right?
Another fun paper was saying this: Because the population is normal, we don’t have to “scare” about the sample size. Well! Well! Well! What can I say? You might think of sample size is a kind of monster so that it will scare you once it gets too big!!! And even the sample size gets to big, no need to worry because we have a normal population which waits to protect us. You are right! But I guess this poor student meant “Because the population is normal, we don’t have to “care” about the sample size.” That little “s” made me laugh a lot! Thank you! Whoever you are! There were also so many misusages of the words of variation, variable, variance, variability and variant. One student wrote about “standard variation” and used the same word in different pages. I thought he meant “deviation”… Another misusage was sample and sampling. That is why they wrote sample is normally distributed instead of sampling distribution of means is normal. Some even wrote that “We are 95% confident that sample mean is between … and … “ instead of “We are 95% confident that population mean is between … and … “ Should I also mention the one who wrote “regression region” instead of “rejection region”? Or the one who wrote “significantly positive” rather than writing “strongly positive”.
On another paper I saw this: The student calculated the probability of revenue of the health clinic will exceed a certain amount. To calculate the probability that exactly in three weeks of a month the revenue can exceed the same amount, he multiplies the first number by three. Well, this is a fine mistake but not unpreventable! Because after he multiplied it by three, he got a 1.149. Then here he must see that something is wrong! How can a probability value become more than 1? He does not worry about it! That is Math he might have thought! Actually this is a big problem! A good student can feel the mistake before ending the question. One student calculated standard deviation so high that it is almost twice the range! Well! Any reasonable person knows that standard deviation is usually a small number comparing with range. Another student copied my notation of distance between two quartiles but apparently he did not understand the notation. Instead of subtracting small number from big one to find the distance, he has multiplied them. The result was satisfactory since he got the direction of skewness correct but with a weird (and a new) method.
I have mentioned algebraic disasters and there were so many on the exam papers. Should I teach my students that a/(b/c) is not equal to a/b/c? I think this is something they are supposed to learn at high school, or even middle school. I have studied “order of operations” in grade 8 and since then I did not forget how the brackets make our life easier! Another big algebraic problem was forgetting the position of the parenthesis or totally ignoring it before taking squares. This of course caused big troubles.
Some students were actually very lucky. They have made two mistakes such that those two mistakes somehow cancel each other and lead the operations to the right answer. It was amazing to see how the math works in a case like this but of course student did not get much share from my amazement! He lost the points and I laughed at the numbers dancing before my eyes.
At the end I have finished marking before 3 pm while listening to Mass Requiem from Mozart. I went to school, entered the grades. While entering the grades to the grade sheet, I have realized that some of the papers I have marked are not actually mine. They were from other groups. At least 10 students wrote their group numbers or their teacher’s name wrong. I got a paper it says “Blaise” at the blank which is for teacher’s name. The funny thing is there is no Statistics teacher called Blaise in this semester. He taught Statistics last semester. When I told him that “you have a Statistics paper to be marked because there is your name on it”, he supposed a paper left from last semester, he forgot to mark and now he needs to do it. Some students wrote that they belong to group 10 or 11. We don’t have group 10 or 11. I spent almost half an hour to find out who is in which group by checking their numbers one by one on SRS lists. In fact one student wrote his number wrong so it took me more than 10 minutes to realize that his number does not exist in the whole lists.
Anyway, the day is over… I again turned to English in my blog but this is an exception. I want my students and other Statistics lecturers also read this. They can even contribute it and we can have a list of common and funny Statistics mistakes. It might help prospective Statistics students to be aware of them and not to repeat.
Tomorrow I will continue writing in Turkish… There are things in my mind which have been waiting for last 4 days. I stopped writing because of the exam papers but now I have no more excuse… Back to work!
I have just finished marking final exam papers. It has been a long marathon of boring readings and markings. Reading the same answer eighty times and putting a similar mark beside the answer all the time is a sort of torture as well. However I have no right to complain about marking since it is part of my job and it is an indispensable thing in terms of assessment. In fact marking exam papers can also be fun sometimes!
Last night I worked until 1 am so that I can leave only 10 more papers to today. I did! Although lots of distraction tried to stop me and I was so tempted to take action against my own targets, I achieved to stay awake until 1 am. I realized that the speed of marking is decreasing by the elapsing time. If I mark five papers in the first one hour, then in the second hour this number drops to four or even three. The third one hour period might yield one or two papers at all. The main reason for the deceleration must be exhaustion due to the reading same things over and over and paying attention to the grammatically wrong sentences or algebraically inconsistent mathematical equations. I did not deduct any point for the grammar mistakes as long as the sentence is semantically correct and gives me the right idea. I cannot blame students for the grammar mistakes they did since it is their second language. I would not be able to imagine myself taking a Statistics exam in Vietnamese! I would definitely fail! While marking papers and noting the most common mistakes, I also fabricated possible errors I have had in my recent IELTS test. I talked about the “inflection” point for an analysis of a graph. What if I spelled “inflection” wrong and made a big mess about the statistical analysis… A sentence like “The inflection on the curve stops her (UK) to reach the climax point” can easily turn to “An infection on the curve stops her to reach the climax point” or “An injection on the curve stops her to reach the climax point” …
One can have fun with marking! It is not easy but still not impossible! When I woke up today morning at 8 am, even before having my simple breakfast of eggs, bread and coffee, I wanted to mark a few more papers. It might be good to start the day with marking. Why not! It is a mental exercise and it opens up one’s mind in terms of finding errors and being just. After getting to bed at 1 am last night, I could not sleep well. I was marking papers all night, correcting, ticking on the papers, writing notes on another paper, crossing out, laughing at funny answers, and drawing hanging man beside a wrong answer, hesitating to give an extra five points for a partially correct answer, crying while seeing the sum of all points does not reach up to 50% and even talking with the owner of the exam paper. It lasted all night and it was really colorful. These things happen to me a lot! Whatever I work on before sleeping, I continue doing it all night during my sleep. When I used to work on school timetables for the high school I worked in Bangkok, whenever I stop working in the evening and went to bed straight, all night I continued playing with Excel boxes and colors assigned to each teacher on the spreadsheet. It was like playing Tetris and suddenly when you close your eyes, those shapes don’t stop dropping from the ceiling. Hopefully I am not a narcoleptic! I can still differentiate the dreams from reality and when I wake up I know where the movie ended. Sometimes I also believe that every good writer must be a little bit narcoleptic. He or she must believe that dreams are true so that he or she can make others believe his/her dreams are real and why he/she wrote them as if they are real. A good novel is nothing more than an attempt to convince others that your dreams are true. Especially South American writers are more closed to this kind of definition. They write their dreams with an enormous power that the dream or the magic becomes real. That is why we call Latin American literature as “magical realism”. Who can stay untouched after reading “One Hundred years of Solitude” or “Blindness”. Although they look like dreams or imaginations, they are actually as real as Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” or Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”. Anyway, in this case being narcoleptic is not as good as being a writer! Imagine that I dream I have finished marking, entered all the exam scores to the grading sheet and did the moderation. Then next morning I am at the airport waiting for the flight which will take me to white sands of Ko Chang! But in real, nothing is completed! Dream is dream, real is real! Time to wake up! I don’t want to be embarrassed like Sarah in Jonathan Coe’s novel “House of Sleep”. She thought she moved the footnotes from the article but actually it was all dream. Next month her boyfriend lost his job and the magazine he worked has been sued by Pope, prince of England and four more influential figures. It was all because of her narcolepsy. Funny ending though, a little bit cruel for Sarah!
After having breakfast I put one of the Mozart CDs to the player. It was Marriage of Figaro at the beginning. I said to myself “what a good start!” and continued my fight with papers. One of the most amazing mistakes done by students is logical inconsistency. Most of my students think that “if A then B” is equivalent to “if not A then not B”. I don’t know where they got this idea from but this wrong logical implication cost them a lot. They also kept making mistake of “assuming” the normality of population. Even though the question clearly says that the population is normal, they want to assume it! This must be effect of memorizing the sentences instead of understanding them. They don’t want to accept the fact! Assuming may sound better for some but not in this case. Besides this, almost 30% of my student spelled “assume” as “assumpt”. If I had different variations, I would think that they don’t know how to spell “assume” but there was no any other kind of misspelling. Either “assume” or “assumpt” were all on the papers. I wondered that they studied same notes or same book which leads them to this misspelling… How can we explain this? There must be other ways to misspell a word, right?
Another fun paper was saying this: Because the population is normal, we don’t have to “scare” about the sample size. Well! Well! Well! What can I say? You might think of sample size is a kind of monster so that it will scare you once it gets too big!!! And even the sample size gets to big, no need to worry because we have a normal population which waits to protect us. You are right! But I guess this poor student meant “Because the population is normal, we don’t have to “care” about the sample size.” That little “s” made me laugh a lot! Thank you! Whoever you are! There were also so many misusages of the words of variation, variable, variance, variability and variant. One student wrote about “standard variation” and used the same word in different pages. I thought he meant “deviation”… Another misusage was sample and sampling. That is why they wrote sample is normally distributed instead of sampling distribution of means is normal. Some even wrote that “We are 95% confident that sample mean is between … and … “ instead of “We are 95% confident that population mean is between … and … “ Should I also mention the one who wrote “regression region” instead of “rejection region”? Or the one who wrote “significantly positive” rather than writing “strongly positive”.
On another paper I saw this: The student calculated the probability of revenue of the health clinic will exceed a certain amount. To calculate the probability that exactly in three weeks of a month the revenue can exceed the same amount, he multiplies the first number by three. Well, this is a fine mistake but not unpreventable! Because after he multiplied it by three, he got a 1.149. Then here he must see that something is wrong! How can a probability value become more than 1? He does not worry about it! That is Math he might have thought! Actually this is a big problem! A good student can feel the mistake before ending the question. One student calculated standard deviation so high that it is almost twice the range! Well! Any reasonable person knows that standard deviation is usually a small number comparing with range. Another student copied my notation of distance between two quartiles but apparently he did not understand the notation. Instead of subtracting small number from big one to find the distance, he has multiplied them. The result was satisfactory since he got the direction of skewness correct but with a weird (and a new) method.
I have mentioned algebraic disasters and there were so many on the exam papers. Should I teach my students that a/(b/c) is not equal to a/b/c? I think this is something they are supposed to learn at high school, or even middle school. I have studied “order of operations” in grade 8 and since then I did not forget how the brackets make our life easier! Another big algebraic problem was forgetting the position of the parenthesis or totally ignoring it before taking squares. This of course caused big troubles.
Some students were actually very lucky. They have made two mistakes such that those two mistakes somehow cancel each other and lead the operations to the right answer. It was amazing to see how the math works in a case like this but of course student did not get much share from my amazement! He lost the points and I laughed at the numbers dancing before my eyes.
At the end I have finished marking before 3 pm while listening to Mass Requiem from Mozart. I went to school, entered the grades. While entering the grades to the grade sheet, I have realized that some of the papers I have marked are not actually mine. They were from other groups. At least 10 students wrote their group numbers or their teacher’s name wrong. I got a paper it says “Blaise” at the blank which is for teacher’s name. The funny thing is there is no Statistics teacher called Blaise in this semester. He taught Statistics last semester. When I told him that “you have a Statistics paper to be marked because there is your name on it”, he supposed a paper left from last semester, he forgot to mark and now he needs to do it. Some students wrote that they belong to group 10 or 11. We don’t have group 10 or 11. I spent almost half an hour to find out who is in which group by checking their numbers one by one on SRS lists. In fact one student wrote his number wrong so it took me more than 10 minutes to realize that his number does not exist in the whole lists.
Anyway, the day is over… I again turned to English in my blog but this is an exception. I want my students and other Statistics lecturers also read this. They can even contribute it and we can have a list of common and funny Statistics mistakes. It might help prospective Statistics students to be aware of them and not to repeat.
Tomorrow I will continue writing in Turkish… There are things in my mind which have been waiting for last 4 days. I stopped writing because of the exam papers but now I have no more excuse… Back to work!
Well, I'm glad I found your English post!
YanıtlaSilIf you have to go insane marking papers, listening to Mozart's requiem is a stylish way to do it! I hope you had a shirt with baggy sleeves and were dripping ink from a bent and rusty pen nib all over the place....
Now, for next semester, you need a grand piano to spread all your exam papers out on, and a glass of claret.
Hugs,
Maddy
Hi Ali,
YanıtlaSilIt's so great to know about these things. I guess I had these mistakes, too ^^
teacher! i have read this entry though it's too late now :)
YanıtlaSil