Week 7

The long awaited deadline for submission of first drafts of formal essay 1 has at last arrived. Despite being warned many times that the most common reason for students not being successful on courses is that they don’t read/listen to and follow instructions, there was considerable surprise when many essays were rejected because they did not fulfil basic requirements. As I collected essays I had a quick precursory look for basic things like inclusion of instructions and length and on this basis alone many essays were returned. The shock of it. When Mr David says he wants a minimum of 3 pages, he means it. Some students think they were clever and, through tampering with margins and putting huge spaces between paragraphs it looks as though they have written 3 pages. However, these students will have their essays returned with no feedback as they too have not met the minimum requirements. At least those who blatantly fail to attain the minimum standards, which was apparant on the submission day, had their essays returned immediately and most of them, by the next day had made the necessary changes and so only lose 10% for being late. The others however, will receive a rude awakening…

As usual when students screw up, I end up having to do lots of extra work. All those who submitted substand work initially had to resubmit their work to turnitin.com and so I had to keep logging in and deleting essays so that they could submit new drafts. I won’t be doing this in future and so students had beter make sure that they do what they are told in the future as there won’t be any second chances.

So, for me, it was one of those really trying weeks when I had to get lots of grading done. However, by Thursday evening, depite being up as early as 3am some mornings, I had only succeeded in grading 2 essays. This was mainly because of other responsibilities related to committee work within the Communication Program. Thus my weekend was spend conducting an intensive grading session through Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

This week was also the deadline for submission of podcasts. As usual there were the few who submitted files with such illuminating titles as “Track1” or “Podcast”. Even if they don’t read instructions, one would hope that students would at least use their common sense and realise that 70 students submitting files with names such as the above is just not a sensible thing to do. The bottom line is that the teacher needs to know whose work it is in order to be able to allocate a grade to it. Again, I had to spend many hours transferring these files to my website but I am pleased to say that there were not as many technical hitches as last semester. Yet again, the fact that some students live off campus has caused some problems with meeting deadlines. Students seem to think that all they have to do is tell met that they live off campus and they automatically get an extension. We all know that accessing drives from off campus is slow. If we start uploading a file that is 50MB at 4.55pm, we should know that we are not going to make a 5pm deadline. But of course none of this is the student’s fault. İt’s the Internet’s problem.