Student Assessment
Posted on January 19, 2022 Leave a Comment
As an academic, one of the most important tasks I do is to mark students’ work. In terms of job satisfaction the task varies from those rare occasions when a student produces some superlative work to the usual drudgery of working through seemingly endless essays or exam scripts, each one a poor copy of the one before, and a sad representation of what is to come, especially if they are all answering the same questions. Some of the work is very good, some (not too many) dreadful, but much is – to be honest – just mediocre, neither good nor bad, but sufficiently competent to get a mid-range mark. Marking periods are just that, periods, preceded by pre-marking tension (PMT), and consisting of mood swings and the need for quantities of alcohol (which is difficult as I have given up drinking).
The main exception is usually when marking projects, where a lot of genuinely independent work has gone into solving a problem through scientific endeavour.
In the past marking consisted of big piles of paper, which gradually shifted from one side of the desk to the other, with various scribbles added, and ring stains of endless tea. Now it consists of long days of staring at a computer screen, trying to determine whether what is in front of you is a masterpiece or an essay bought from the large number of cheating sites that are available, where a student can purchase, for a reasonable sum, an essay written specially for the purpose, the standard varying according to cost, usually written by impecunious PhD students who have blurred lines about what is right and wrong and an empty food cupboard. I have no idea how common such cheating is, but for me it is a good reason to go back to exams, rather than coursework. More difficult to cheat at, but worse to mark because of the handwriting.
I did catch someone cheating in an exam once. I was walkingup and down the aisles and saw a student with a piece of paper covering whole pages of notes. I wanted to pick her up by her ear, yell at her and throw her outside, but in the modern world I took the cheat sheet and exam materials away, and led her out of the room, telling her that there would be trouble for cheating. Unfortunately people who cheat in this way rarely get thrown out, just given 0% and another chance. It would be better to birch them in public to discourage the others.
When marking was carried out on paper the world was a much easier place. Put a few comments (information for the student if if it is coursework or a second examiner for guidance), add a mark and you are done. Compile the marks at the end and hand them to an admistrator who will magically prepare them for the exam board. Now, with the advent of computer marking, the world should be an easier place because computers make the world easier don’t they? They don’t. Some reasons for marking now being harder because of computers:
- It is more difficult to read and flip backwards and forwards through an essay online than as a few sheets of paper
- It is fiddly to put comments on the script
- It is impossible to strike a big red line through something that annoys you
- While the marks should – you would think – automatically be entered into a system that produces a report for the exam board, it doesn’t. Often one has to rewrite the marks into some other system, eg Excel, and send that in to the administrator (who often doesn’t exist in the same way any more, but that is another story).
- Staring at a screen for hours, reading thousands and thousands of words is just not good for you
- etc, add your own, there is a limit to the length of a blog.
Second marking is a little controversial. It is, in principle, a good idea. Two people looking at a piece of work, coming up with independent marks and then coming to some agreement has to be a good thing. Or not. The problem with marking is that there is huge variation between markers. It is intrinsically subjective, no matter how much experience the marker has. There is ample evidence that markers vary, particularly at the extremes. Where one marker sees genius and awards a first class mark, another marker sees rubbish, and awards a low mark. Agreeing a compromise mark, sorry an objective mark, is all very well but there are power and other issues involved. A more senior academic is likely to get their view even though a PhD student doing the marking has perhaps been more conscientious. We also audit mark. This consists of one person marking properly and a second person looking at a sample of the scripts and going, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s fine’. Marking is subjective, we just hope it all comes out in the wash. Students have so many assessments that the final average should be just about right, we hope.
How do we deal with this? The solution, according to many people (who may or may not be employable in other industries) is to spend time on aims and learning outcomes. The aims of a module are something to do with what the module is meant to be about. The learning outcomes are what we hope the student is going to learn, and what we plan to assess. We then provide marking guidelines. These work at two levels, a) generally what we mean by A, B, C and fail; b) information about the content that should be included in the essay.
These are easy to deal with. The second one first. In my view, any academic who tells students what they expect to see in an essay is not really an academic. It is the student’s job to work out what to include and how, though the modern academic world is full of students being told to include this and that, but not the other. If a student asks me what should be in an assessment I just say I don’t know, because I don’t. I want the student to inspire me, teach me, inform me, educate me, not bore me stupid with rote answers that could be provided by a chimpanzee with an intellectual deficit.
The first one second. With marks, A means excellent, B means very good but a little flawed or lacking in spark, C means competent but mediocre (see above; remember, mediocre is not necessarily bad, just, well, mediocre). That makes sense, but in the modern world we are told to write long accounts of exactly what we mean by excellent, etc in our marking guidelines so that students can read them and somehow be helped, and markers can read them and somehow be helped. That is just bollocks or, thinking about it,if we already know that A means excellent how can we add anything to this? ‘The introduction needs to be excellent, the conclusion nees to be excellent’, etc. Just saying excellent means excellent is a pointless tautology, no matter how many words you attach to excellent.
There is also an argument about the amount of feedback we provide, from the odd tick and a mark through to the marker writing an essay about the essay. The general rule seems to be provide more feedback, and then provide even more. There are two useful forms of feedback. The best one, and the most important, is the mark. If you get 75% you know you have done very well, that your work is excellent. If you get 35% you know you have failed, which is bad. The other useful form of feedback is having a detailed discussion one on one between the student and marker and discussing the issues that arise from the essay. This can only happen if the marker has not provided guidelines which indicate what should and should not be in the essay, because in effect that is the marker’s essay and they are only marking how well their own work has been presented. It only works when the student has come up with an interesting answer that is a heuristic for further discussion. Most of the actual feedback we give (‘good point’, ‘needs clarifying’, ‘yes’, ‘need reference’, etc) is of little value. These are the things students should be able to understand themselves.
Some psychological research back in the 1970s explored the notion of experts and novices. It was argued, quite successfully I believe, that there are fundamental differences between novices, who have to express everything explicitly (remember learning to drive?) and experts, for whom knowledge and skills are implicit. If we take this to be true then as expert markers how can we create explicit marking guidelines if the skills of marking are implicit (which they are)?
The best way to move from the explicit to the implicit stage of marking, ie to become an expert, is to do the marking, and initially to share it with someone who has been marking for years. That is the best training. Oh yes, and when I started at a certain university I was advised to start your comments to the student with a positive remark (yes, it is possible to do this, ‘well done, you handed something in’), then explain why the work is crap/good, and then finish with another positive remark (‘You spelt your name right’). The classic sandwich.
While I could go on about this subject a long time, I have just one more point, perhaps the most important one, which I may come back to another time. Over the several decades I have been in academia standards have changed – dramatically, and for the worse. At the extreme an essay that might have got 58% in the past is now getting 72%, from 2.2 to 1st class. Certainly the standards have moved at least a full class. This is in some ways inevitable for two reasons, mass higher education which means that to ensure most people pass we have to lower standards because many of the people at university are now from the lower intellectual orders, basically the cohorts are not as bright as they were. Second, we have a customer focus. Students are not students any more, they are customers and they expect good marks. I will deal with this in detail in another blog.
In conclusion, marking can be exciting, but it is – let’s be honest – usually a chore. It is one of the less enjoyable parts of our job. I know students who have spent hours poring over their work may be disappointed by this but sorry, that is the way it is. Project work is usually the main exception. This blog is not meant as a whinge. As someone who has done a proper job, being an academic – including the marking – is still not real work, more of a lifestyle choice.
Being offended
Posted on January 16, 2022 1 Comment
Society is full of people who appear to be offended by so many things. In our ‘woke’ times (horrible term) it is apparently necessary to take offence at the slightest thing, often when the object of the offence has little to do with the person claiming to be offended. It is a little like people claiming to be traumatised about something they have read. You are not traumatised, you are upset. You have not been offended, you disagree with someone. There is a big difference.
People are offended too easily. They are offended by the slightest comment, by careless remarks, and particularly by comments made that are not in agreement with the ‘woke’ agenda. A good example is when JK Rowling remarked that women need spaces where they are safe from men, including biological men claiming female gender. Rowling made a reasonable point, basically that people with penises shouldn’t be in women’s toilets. If you disagree with this then fine, argue your alternative point, but it is not reasonable to do as some have done, refused to countenance opposition to current notions of gender and assuming those who disagree are committing hate crimes, and in this case effectively cancelled Rowling. That is just a childish or mardy response and entirely inappropriate to the circumstances. If you listen to people like Rowling (who probably represents a majority of people), all she meant is that biological women needs places they can be confident there are no biological men around because biological men can be, or can be perceived as, threatening. Tht sounds to me like a pretty strong statement in favour of caring for women.
Whether or not you agree or disagree with Rowling the point is that people should not be taking offence so easily, it endangers free speech and open dialogue. We are entitled to different opinions. It is through argument that we make progress, that ideas, morality, science, etc improve.
There is a big difference between personal offence, where someone has directly and personally insulted a specific individual, where it may be appropriate to take offence (though it is often better to ignore or respond reasonably), and indirect offence, where the comments are indirect, as is the case of Rowling. People have a right to criticise, to have an opinion, and society cannot move forward if this is not the case, if people just claim to be offended to shut someone up. That stifles debate and is illiberal – which is ironic given that many of those claiming to be offended by certain comments on transgender, race, sexism and so on also claim to be liberals on the left of politics, with the often implicit suggestion that those who oppose their ideas are right wing conservatives. This is so far from reality.
These ‘woke’ (that word again) people are not liberals, they are authoritarians, and authoritarianism, whether on the left or right, is undesirable in an enlightened society. We need to be more openminded, more accepting of different points of view. Don’t ‘cancel’ someone you don’t agree with and get offended, listen to them properly, and if you still don’t agree with them, argue your own case. Society will be better for it.
At the moment the woke people make a lot of noise and have caused significant damage to free speech and debate. People are being cancelled on social media, TV shows (and adverts) are woke, and woke people are criticising the use of books that contain supposedly unacceptable words such as nigger (my nickname as a child by the way). There are many instances of this problem and I hope to address some of them in future blogs. It is largely a very recent phenomenon and, I hope, will only be a temporary one. I don’t want to live in a society where they burn books because, as the Geman Jew Heinrich Heine said, “where they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings too.” And he was right.
Taking offence is largely something you choose to do. If you want to improve interactions among people in society, try being less offended and more openminded. We will all be better off.
Of Human Bondage
Posted on December 5, 2021 Leave a Comment
I enjoyed Spinoza when I read him as an undergraduate. I had some feeling for his interpretations of god and human behaviour. He was a rationalist, which fitted my youthful desires to understand the universe. He was a sort of pantheist, with god being everywhere and everything rather than being a bored bearded old chap sitting on a cloud punishing the misdemeanours of man. I preferred to think of him as an atheist of his time, finding a rational explanation for the state of the universe and calling it god so that it did not upset the god-ridden authorities of the age in which he lived.
Then there was Spinoza’s ethics. Spinoza reasoned that nothing was intrinsically good or evil, and was only so in relation to our perceptions of good and evil. He recognised that we had different ways of thinking, and one powerful way was through the emotions. Emotions, according to Spinoza, have some control over our thoughts and actions and though we may aim for rational thought emotions are powerful, ie we are in bondage to our emotions, hence the title of Somerset Maugham’s ‘Of Human Bondage’, a semi-autobiographical account of Maugham’s early life expressed through the main character Philip Carey.
I tried reading Maugham when I was 18, the age at which we try everything and know nothing. I hated his writing. It has taken me until now to try again. This time I enjoyed reading Of Human Bondage, but I did not like Philip Carey, and I still have a dislike, if that is possible through a novel, of Somerset Maugham. Both come across as ungrateful selfish people who are incapable of having a positive loving relationship. Philip cannot love those who love him, and only loves those who don’t deserve his love. Maugham expressed something similar in his own life.
Maugham was bisexual. In later life he said ‘I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and only a quarter of me was queer – whereas really it was the other way round.’ He had an affair with Syrie Wellcome and later married her. They had one daughter who Maugham in later life disowned because he wanted to adopt his male secretary. Maugham lost the court case. After his marriage failed he lived for many years in France with his male lover, Gerald Haxton. The extent to which he had difficulties being in loving relationships was due to his bisexuality and the age he lived in is unknown, as is the way he expressed relationships in his works such as Of Human Bondage and the poor marriage in ‘The Painted Veil’.
Of Human Bondage is a sad novel, with unfortunate characters who in the main do not achieve much of value. Unhappiness runs through the pages, whether the discussion is about Philip who never really settles to anything, or the surrounding characters, who are mainly failures in their own ways. Philip searches for the meaning of life. Early on he rejects god, and eventually he discovers that life has no intrinsic meaning (similar to Spinoza) and that the only meaning is at the personal level. When he achieves this knowledge he still does not act on it and work out ways in which he can be happy, instead he continues fumbling through and making continual errors. We see this best of all in the failed relationships he has with others, whether friends, family or lovers. Even at the end where there appears to be a little hope he still cannot attain happiness. He cannot love well.
‘To read without joy is stupid’
Posted on November 27, 2021 Leave a Comment
The title is a quotation by John Edward Williams, a US novellist I knew nothing about until a couple of days ago when Sue showed me his novel, Butcher’s Crossing, in Derby Waterstones. On the back it suggested that this was a book that influenced Cormac McCarthy, so as a fan of McCarthy I bought it and read it in just a few hours.
It is set in 1870s USA, specifically Kansas and Colorado, a decade or so after the war, in the last days when men could make money from buffalo hides. The story involves a young man who heads west to the small town with a pocketful of money, a bequest from an uncle, with a view of having some sort of adventure. He teams up with Miller, and they have an adventure, they go buffalo hunting.
The descriptions are vivid, whether of nearly dying of thirst crossing the plains, or the details of shooting and skinning buffalo. The book somehow manages to contain a wealth of interest in a very simple story. I thoroughly recommend it.
The genre is Western Realism, in a similar vein to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (itself somewhat anti-Western, about a gang that goes around killing Indians). There are no shootouts, no one plays pokers or rustles cattle, there is just the realism of trying to survive in difficult circumstances, and the knowledge someone needs in order to do so.
Williams was from Texas, he served in the US army during the war, then ended up teaching English literature and creative writing. His other books include Stoner, a campus novel that I will be obtaining and reading soon, and Augustus, about Caesar Augustus. I hope to be discussing them soon. A biography of Williams, by Charles Shields was entitled ‘The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel’. I have only read one of them so far, but the title does seem to be a fair description.
Time to end the Covid restrictions?
Posted on October 7, 2020 Leave a Comment
I have thought for some time that the Covid restrictions are possibly more dangerous to our health than allowing Covid to run its course ‘naturally’. The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD, https://gbdeclaration.org/) comes at a critical time, when governments are imposing yet more restrictions on movement, meetings and economic activity. For those who have missed the flurry of scientific argument over the last few days, the GBD is a document signed by several thousand scientists and medics who believe that the current restrictions should be removed and herd immunity allowed to run its course with Covid, with the proviso that the old and the vulnerable should be protected. It does not spell out in detail how all this should happen, but it is a starting point.
It is time that this position was laid out for debate. For too long the discussions about the impact of Covid have been too narrow, with the strong view that we need to wear masks, socially distance, work from home, etc, even though there is little solid evidence that these are having a positive effect – there is no control group to make a comparison with. While the science around a new virus is inevitably going to be ambiguous, the data contradictory, and speculations rife, we have had little opportunity to challenge the status quo. This is not only poor science, it also undermines the liberal consensus that has dominated Western society for centuries. Where controls are shown to be necessary we can accept the,, but it is not acceptable to force people to act in ways contrary to their wishes without very strong evidence, and then for as little time as possible.
Herd immunity was briefly considered and rejected by the UK Government early in the crisis. Perhaps at the time this was the right decision, perhaps not. Seven months on we know more, though we still lack consensus. The contradictions in the data and analyses are still present, the limitations of the actual data signficant. What we do know is that Covid tends to kill the old and the sick. It has relatively little impact on other groups. Yes, some younger people die, and there is the problem of long term illness in some people which seems to be a result of Covid infection, but most people are only affected to a minor degree.
While older people are expected to die – that is the nature of things – you may be wondering how we can think about a strategy that might allow younger people to die. Who are these younger people who are getting seriously ill and dying from Covid? Presumably people with underlying health conditions are at risk as with older age groups. Are there other factors involved such as illegal drug use making someone vulnerable? Is it drinking habits? Are there other general social risk factors which lead to a higher risk of having a severe response to Covid? We need to know these things, and if it is the case that there are risk factors then younger age groups need to be educated about them so they can make choices about how to behave.
To turn to the detrimental effects of the restrictions. Should we be imposing these restrictions on the general population when we know they are having a detrimental effect on both health and the economy?
The economic restrictions have put many people out of work, many others have reduced income, many businesses have gone bust or are struggling, cash reserves are dwindling fast both at the national level and in terms of individuals’ and businesses’ bank accounts. The health impact of the damaged ecomony is unclear, but it is inevitably going to be – already is – severe.
Another area of concern is that many hospitals restricted or shut down their normal care for people when the Covid crisis started. Health workers were shifted into Covid-ready positions, beds were cleared for the expected rush of Covid patients. This meant that many people with severe illnesses who required urgent treatment did not receive it. How many died, how many have a reduced life expectancy, how many remain more ill than they should be, remains to be seen. During the crisis period of April and May this year many more people died than we would normally expect. It is assumed they died because of Covid. That is probably so for some. It is also very likely that many died because they did not receive treatment for other serioous diseases.
I should declare a personal interest. Just before lockdown I was diagnosed with heart failure and with atrial fibrillation. That makes me ‘vulnerable’ (which is partly why I am happy to consider the argument of herd immunity, I may end up one of the victims (In the end the population matters more than the individual). I have recently had successful treatment for my atrial fibrillation that has made my health and my life significantly better. I should have received this treatment in April or May. I received it in September. Just a small example, but it shows the impact of the NHS shutting down much of its general treatment for Covid. Healthwise, I have been very ill most of the year instead of for two or three months, economically I have been off work since January. This has cost my employer a significant amount of money. I could have been back at work in May (hopefully I will be back in November).
Yes, I have signed the Great Barrington Declaration. I have joined the thousands of other scientists and medical practitioners who want to change the way we are dealing with Covid. Yes, there are problems with the position. It might be wrong, but we need to at least look at the alternatives to the current course of action which is undoubtedly causing a great deal of problems regarding health and the economy both within the country and across the world. I worry that once we get back to normal and analyse the impact of Covid we will find significantly more problems because of our over-reaction (?) than because of the virus itself.
Dr Nigel Hunt 