Experience marking exam papers

This year would be my first year ever in my entire life marking exam papers. As you may know, I am a tutor for Introductory Microeconomics in the Department of Economics in my university. So I signed up one day to mark exam papers. And successfully I was rostered.

So yesterday and today I successfully marked a total of 300 exam papers!

And boy, did I realise how hard the exam paper was before I marked it. Jeff, our lecturer, was really mean! He gave such a hard exam paper. I feel for my students and others who did the paper. Almost every question required serious thinking. Only the really competent could do really well.

Marking was not easy. I was assigned to mark question C2 of the exam. That is the question that most people would stuff up because it was such a long question and it is about a hard topic.

I had to mark fairly as well which made it more difficult as I had to fail around ~150 students for that question! Yes, approximately half of the papers I marked. The worst was 0 and the best was 15 out of 15. The average was about 8 or 9.

There was a few things I learnt from marking exams including:

1. Always make it easy for the tutors to read!

2. Tutors mark exams.

3. Tutors like dot points rather than long, long essay answers

4. Make sure your answers are neat and EASY to find! Not hidden somewhere in the tables of data you have given.

5. Make sure you do your answers all in one go! Do not separate the answer into 3 sections all over the exam paper making the marker having to find your answer!

6. Make sure you don't write rubbish! But writing facts about theory actually contributes to marks.

7. Answer the question! Not answering another question is actually a big deal!


But having said all of that, there were some timeless advice I saw outside Bailieu.

Thanks Mr. Bailieu for putting that out for all of us! Real encouragement indeed! We all feel less stressed now. :P