Final Exams and Marking Extravaganza

This week we had final exams for the two courses I am teaching, namely Quantitative Methods and Data Analysis I (despite the fancy name, it is essentially Applied Calculus), which is on Monday, and Linear Algebra which is on Wednesday. Both subjects had six different groups; I taught two groups for QM (this is what it is popularly called there by students and staff and it took me quite awhile to get used to this, since QM in my head, automatically translates to Quantum Mechanics) and one group for Linear Algebra. Each group may be of different size, typically over sixty. I had 87 and 105 for QM and 68 for Linear Algebra. So in order to conduct an exam for all the six groups for each group simultaneously, we do need a big exam hall. Indeed, they had LY3 (which stands for Ling Yun 3 - unsure what the name refers to), with the ground floor capable of accommodating around 600 students. I was told there were other exam halls, which I have not gone to as yet.

Exams are conducted in strict fashion and are administered by a central Exam Unit and invigilators are discouraged from staying put or looked at the mobile phones during the exam. I had already a little experience before while I was teaching at Physics Department there, but I only had a small group then. For this semester, it was a real learning experience dealing with large number of students. They also implemented that uniform marking across different groups with each lecturer marking specific questions for the exam. So for the previous midterm exam, I got a huge surprise of having roughly 1000 scripts to look through (roughly 500 for each subject). I was terribly slow then given my first experience of such large number of scripts to mark, and we had to prepare for our lessons as well. Then, I also had the conference in Krabi, Thailand which sort of slowed down my marking (absence of a week). For this final exam, my colleague lecturers spared me from looking into many questions (I can't thank you enough). Also, with no teaching left, I was able to mark faster now. I have already switched bundles of scripts with my colleagues and tomorrow, God willing, I will be doing another exchange.

So for this week, my condition is very much like the cats below with lyrics of Adele's songs "Hello from the other side" in my head.