I don't know if I am the only one who brought about this move, but the leaders of this test scoring project did something uncharacteristic (at least as far as I know them) on Friday. We have a chatroom, what I think Slack looks like (I have never used Slack), and our supervisor dropped a message at the beginning of our shift, something he has done maybe three times in the past three months of the project. He gave us a goal to meet. "Let's do 100 papers tonight!" he said.
On Thursday, I did something I had done when I did test scoring projects in-person, and it's something I should have done at the outset of this project. I took a Post-It note and ticked every paper I scored for that shift. I started doing it many years ago when, well, we scorers on the project were warned by that project's boss to pick up the pace, and that tracking your output for that day would be the smart thing to do. It is smart. And after my boss "noticed my work" on Wednesday, I remembered that, so on Thursday, I started tracking myself.
And do you know how much faster I went? By, uh, ten essays. That's it. And on Friday, once my supervisor's edict came down, I tried to go even faster, and I squeezed out five essays more than the night before. It was well short of 100.
Yeah, I'm slow. But I will defend myself. We are reminded by the company (well, companies -- I should try and get in touch with the other one to see what they're up to) that behind every paper we grade is a student. Regardless of how we score, we need to recognize the humanity behind the writing. And so I imagine a kid, looking down at a paper, being presented then and there with a question that he or she needs to answer in the time allotted -- and, by the way, this project involves grading responses from children for whom English is a second language. And you should see these papers. Not all, but many of these papers are at the least well-thought-out. You can tell that because, of course, those answers are long. But a kid had to spend some time, and thus some thought, on writing out such a long answer.
No, sometimes those answers don't fulfill the requirements of a good score no matter what she or he writes. And, there is a sameness to the papers that make me space out, and space out frequently. But I have a lot of difficulty thinking of the time and thought and care a student puts into writing an essay, only to then take five seconds to speed-read it just to see if he or she used phrases that were complex enough or a sufficient number of words in order to receive a good-enough score. If the child put some thought in writing it, I have the obligation to take at least some time in reading it -- in full. And what I say next might get me in more trouble, but so be it: For ever essay I read -- not just in this scoring project but in past ones as well -- I read it again. We have specific, objective things we need to look for, thus I look it over a second time to make sure I'm not missing something. But I am regarding the paper a level of respect it deserves for being right in front of me, and by extension, I owe the kid who created that paper some consideration and deliberation.
Again, I try to be as commensurate as possible. There are students who either can't or don't write long answers. Those are easy and quick to grade, and so I don't waste my time on those. But as boilerplate as these answers tend to be, there are ideas in them, and there is a structure to those ideas, and so I think they (the children and their responses) are entitled to some time evaluating those creations before I score it and move on to the next one.
Maybe this will cost me involvement in future projects. But, I've been told I've been slow before, and I still keep getting jobs. Now, it might be different this time because this in an online project as opposed to an in-person one. But, bottom line is, I can't go any faster. I gotta be me, man. I gotta be me.
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