If there is anything that teachers hate the most, I think it is assessment.
Correction work is the most difficult to manage. It is endless, it is repetitive, and it is so boring! On top of that, not only am I giving the same comments year after year, to countless students, I am also writing it to the same student multiple times. I don’t know if they are even reading what is being written.
I sometimes wonder if the only reason we write comments is to tell students that we have read what they have written. Who is benefitting from this qualitative feedback? In fact, when I come to think of it, it is not even assessed. In a country that is obsessed with assessment, would they be paying any attention to a task that does not contribute to their overall assessment?
We continually teach that learning has to be separated from assessment. Yet, when it has been ingrained into all our minds since we first stepped into school, maybe even before that, how can we expect it to be thrown out of the window at post graduate level? Students never forget the marks attached to the various assignments. In some cases, we have to remind them. How much weightage does each task carry? How much weightage do we assign to attitudes?
My students are going to be teachers. Everything in the teacher education programme is assessed. A lot of what they present is not something they actually believe in. Just something that they know will fetch them marks. But will this make them good teachers? Or will they perpetuate this obsession with marks throughout their teaching careers?
The cycle doesn’t seem to end. And the whole process continues.
Today during corrections, I was wondering what comments to write. We were never trained into giving comments. Nor were we ever taught how to convert those comments into marks. For the next fifteen weeks, students will be submitting weekly assignments to me. How will I convert that comments I have made into marks? There is no formula for this. And there is no assessment rubric.