<p>Anyone have any experience with professors that take forever to grade your papers? I don't just mean it took him a few weeks. We turned in a 1000 word paper over 7 weeks ago, and over half the class still hasn't gotten it back. We had a 2000 word paper due 2 days ago... semester ends May 1st, so maybe you can see my concern here.</p>
<p>Anyone have any similar experience with a professor? Is he even going to look at our 2nd paper?</p>
<p>Yes it’s annoying. If they can’t grade it all then they shouldn’t even assign it in the first place.</p>
<p>Usually happens to me in the small, humanities courses. Never happens in the huge 300+ student chemistry lectures, even when most of the exam is short answer. It’s an odd discrepancy.</p>
<p>In my experience prof usually does grade all papers (at least whenever I picked up my papers). A couple times it seemed very iffy–but whenever they don’t there’s usually major GRADE INFLATION, so it work out either way.</p>
<p>(Except for the long-term trend of grades becoming meaningless)</p>
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<p>Agreed. And there should be a 2 week deadline on all papers. Anything not graded and returned to students past that deadline gets an automatic A. Clock starts ticking at 12:01 on the day it’s due.</p>
<p>We get penalized if our papers are late, profs should have to compensate us for taking forever to grade them.</p>
<p>I’ll have my say come professor evaluations.</p>
<p>I don’t really care about it tbh…</p>
<p>I turned in a paper a couple weeks ago that I could have gotten anything from a failure to a B on and it still hasn’t been graded and I am DYING.</p>
<p>Haha, I’m a grader so I’m getting a kick out of this.</p>
<p>To whomever said it earlier: Larger classes have TAs and such to help grade papers faster. Small classes, that job is up to the professor. </p>
<p>My Chinese professor has like 45 (or less) students at my university and takes about a week and a half to return exams. She’s also retiring this year because she thinks she has a large load. So she’ll only be teaching at her other university, where she only has a handful of students, lol.</p>
<p>My AP Calc AB teacher in high school had 60+ students for our AP Calc alone and turned around exams overnight. I have no sympathy for profs that have 2-3 graders at their disposal that can’t turn around exams in a week.</p>
<p>We have had 12 HW assignments and have gotten back half of them. Finals are coming up. Totally uncool. Prof, when pressed about it, shrugged and blamed the TA’s. Not lovin’ the teaching this term.</p>
<p>As a TA who grades papers (though I’m [irritatingly, I’ve been told] anal about being on time for everything I do – I’ve never been late grading papers. I think my whole “must be on-time/early” for everything is teetering into OCD zone…) </p>
<p>Wait, what was I saying?</p>
<p>Oh, right. As a TA – an on-time grading one – may I please make a PSA and request that students do not hand in work that looks like a dyslexic hyperactive three year-old wrote it.
Seriously, I’ve had people hand in assignments that are written on the back of Chinese take-out menus, no lie – and on top of that, their handwriting is so chaotic. I don’t mean messy, I literally mean chaotic - like this one kid would write is answers going in a giant circle, so you’d have to spin the paper around to read it.
Other kids would write on napkins with crayons, or write on <em>white</em> graph paper with a bright yellow highlighter, so it was impossible to read. </p>
<p>Mind you, these are students at Columbia. I’ve scratched my head a few times and wondered how these students got past third grade. </p>
<p>The really weird part is that, usually, the kids who tend to do their homework in off the wall ways are usually the ones who get all their answers perfect and leave with an A in the class. </p>
<p>I don’t think the professors even check the homework after I’ve graded it (and they should, we make mistakes sometimes). I don’t think, if they did, they’d accept work written on the back of an Ikea directions manual of how to put together a lamp…</p>
<p>IMO, the professors (at least the couple I assist) depend too heavily on TAs. They really need to double-check that everything is correct – which would also help them see where their class is struggling, if everyone is getting the same questions wrong. </p>
<p>But I can get why profs do use TAs. I don’t think most students get how long it takes to grade. Most of the classed I do are pretty small, 30 - 60 students. That takes 2 - 3 hours sometimes, for that one class. So for a proffessor with four sections, all they’d do all day is grade.</p>
<p>^ I should add that the “2 - 3 hours” I mentioned is for grading engineering and computer science classes. </p>
<p>Obviously, if it’s some history test with true/false answers, it won’t take anywhere near that long.</p>
<p>Really, if the answers are all correct, does it matter what medium you wrote it on? Do you really expect it on parchment written with a quill pen?</p>
<p>Really, is paper and a pen that hard to come by?</p>
<p>I think it’s reasonable to expect real paper with readable work…
Personally, I think in many cases there are good reasons for the professor to take so long. They have to grade a lot more essays than you have to write. And small humanities classes take longer to grade because it’s one professor doing it versus multiple TAs. Sometimes I do kind of wonder (I turned in an annotated bib weeks ago and the prof has still not finished…not sure what she’s doing.) But another prof I have has been slow because she is on the committee to hire a new professor and is the advisor for four honors thesis. So I don’t really blame her. They are busy people; give them a break.</p>
<p>i agree with ^. </p>
<p>it isn’t unreasonable at all to expect students to use appropriate paper and a pen or pencil.</p>
<p>i was just wondering what type of dumbass would think it’s okay to turn in assignments like the ones described.</p>
<p>now i know.</p>
<p>In this case, the class is over 100, but he has 4 TA’s. The TA’s go through it first, and then the professor reviews it. Everything is turned in electronically though, so no one is turning their work in on IKEA directions or Chinese take out menus. Got a kick out of reading that, Plattsburgh.</p>
<p>I understand it’s a lot, but don’t assign it if you can’t grade it. I don’t see how the 2nd paper will be graded.</p>
<p>I guess it depends where you go to college, but as someone who goes to a large, research-oriented university I’m not surprised that prof’s take their time grading. </p>
<p>Even though the class may be of high priority to you, there’s a good chance it’s a mandatory, trivial, and distracting aspect of a successful researcher’s job. [even more so if the class is NOT english–social science/math/science]</p>
<p>The grade is yours to earn. Why should the professor care beyond the minimum professional level? As long as the papers are graded by the end of term, it sounds fine to me.</p>
<p>Hrmmm, I sort of thought the whole idea of homework was to learn, so, like, if you got your graded homework back you might see where you, like, went wrong? So as to, like, learn??? Ok so doing the homework is one learning round, but finding out what you did wrong is just a “bit” important. Before the end of term, thanks. I mean, I am paying the price of house to go to school. I would appreciate it if my work would be graded in time for me to learn from it.</p>