::A Geek in Korea::

So, the months of toil and annoyance of the computerized system at work are finally paying off. Students that I’ve been marking down grades for the past few months, toiling away to post their homework daily on the Internet, tally their scores on tests, and basically working every second I can to keep up with the information. Now the students will now get their evaluations for the past three months.

In the past, this was a hellish experience that ruined two weeks of my time with annoying amounts of tedious paperwork. We’d take the evaluations sheets, then write by hand all the different marks, scribbles, and notes we had made, try to come up with some sort of score, and see how it worked out. This was best for keeping bad things hidden, because sensitive students could get a bump here and there to pad their grades. This might encourage a failing student to stick around to see some improvement.

Now there are nothing but cold hard numbers. All the test scores are totalled by the machine. I entered the scores into the machine initially, but I didn’t throw any weights behind the students. A student that just started at the school should be given more leniency on their first few examinations, but I didn’t have time to factor all these different things in when I was entering them in between classes during a five minute break. All the machine will do is go down the line and nail students for failing homework. It’s going to be brutal when the actual averages come back and students see their homework scores in the low twenty or thirty percentile because they haven’t done their work.

The only input into the process I have to worry about now, besides entering the test scores, is giving a final comment. The only problem with this is that my login causes the machine to crash whenever I leave comments for students. “Student X has been doing a great job. Keep up the good work and continue to do homework.” *Save *Error *Crash *Login *Start on the next student.

It’s very annoying to have to log in each time I’ve done an evaluation. I’ve told my director about it multiple times. It slows me down considerably, but even with this annoying software problem I’m farther along than I would have been if I had to do all the work by hand. I can do three or four classes a day and not be rushed, where it would have taken a day or two for the same amount of work if I really focused.

Right now, I have no idea if the scores I’ve assigned have been entered correctly, if the output on the evaluations will look right, or if the evaluations will even work. I don’t miss doing it by hand, even if the workload day to day entering everything sucks.

EDIT: By some educated sleuthing, I discovered that the crashes were caused by using an apostrophe in my comments. Now I have to write lengthy commentaries about people’s qualities without using possessive nouns. It’s all “David has amazing speaking skills” vs. “David’s speaking skills are amazing.” Very annoying, and you have to break the habit or log in every time.