Through a lot of hard work, I’ve positioned myself pretty well heading into these last couple weeks of school. More or less, I have two papers due and need to review about 20 student portfolios. The papers need to be in the range of 12-20 pages each and the student portfolios shouldn’t take more than a couple hours to go through—at this point, I only need to separate the ones I consider “clear passes” from those that I believe are borderline or failing.

The clearly passing and clearly failing are pretty easy to identify, but it’s the borderline ones that take the most time, as you have to ask yourself whether you could reasonably justify (to yourself at this point) whether they accomplish enough of the course goals to pass. I’ve given the students plenty of time—the last two weeks of class—to get feedback, work on revisions, go to the writing lab, etc. in order to make sure that a variety of readers agree that they’re achieving those goals.

Now, how many of them chose to use this time wisely remains to be seen, but I’ve also informed them well in advance that because I’ve allotted this time and suggested many, many ways to both revise and do some quality assurance testing, I won’t hesitate to bring their portfolios into the assessment room and let someone else be the judge. At least three from my “control” stack automatically go to portfolio assessment anyway, so it’s like I’ve explained: it takes work to pass this class, so do the smart thing and put that work in now rather than not passing, and having to do a whole semester of coursework over again and still have to put this work to increase your odds of passing.

Of course, I also understand where they’re coming from since I’m doing my best to get through the end of the semester too. I think I’m doing well in both my classes, and one final paper I’m pretty set on, the other I’m a bit at sea. My plan is to put my head down and plow through the best I can. According to my calculations, I should have seven full days in the next two weeks to do nothing but concentrate on these two papers, and that’s more than enough time to put something together that’s pretty decent for each.

Of course, if a baby comes anytime before the May 10th due date, all of the above goes out the window as I look for a nice hayfield to crash land in…

Current Mood: A Bit Blah |
Currently Listening To – Björk – “Homogenic”