Comment by mitchi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchi | Hacker News Reader

I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.

> It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.

yea, I never said that. I was just describing what the vacations are. If you think that they don't do research you are partially right because of a lot them don't do it after their permanent status.

Do Professors really have three months of vacation in Canada? I assumed you meant 3 months without classes (which is totally different from vacation). I find it hard to believe that they would get 3 months of vacation.

I am from Austria, and here and in some other European countries typically one has about 5 weeks of vacation per year, so 3 months sounds like a lot. How many weeks of vacation do other people in Canada have, for comparison?

You are required to give 4 classes a year. If you give 2 in the Autumn and 2 in the winter you have your summer free.

Interesting. That seems to be quite different from any other system I've encountered so far. Hereabouts being a professor is an all year job (with usual vacation times), with the two-fold task of doing research as well as doing teaching.

The time periods in which there are no classes are usually used by professors to focus more on their research and take their vacations (5 weeks per year like everyone else). Similarly, these time periods are not strictly holidays for students, with many students taking exams.

I've seen a few professors simply neglect their research and take the whole time period where they don't have classes as "vacation", but this seems to be limited to a few older professors who are still state employed, basically untouchable and seem to have lost their motivation over the years. They usually seem to not do much research at all anymore, but are often willing to pick up additional teaching duties to ease the load on their colleagues.

Most people however do actually work on their research in this time period.

I've had much the same problem as a TA as well. It's really painful having to go back to correct a few scores and sometimes I think I probably still missed something.

I actually made a web application for grading exams which alleviates this somewhat. Basically you grade by creating a rubric, which is a list of items and how many points to deduct for each item (could be additive too, but the professor I wrote it for didn't want that so I never implemented it). When grading you just check the boxes for the items that apply to a specific submission. You can change the weights in place and have all the scores update. Also, since all the exams are scanned and each question is cropped out you can much more easily go between instances of one problem. It's not completely releaseable to the outside world unfortunately but maybe in a month or so it could be. A lot of other professors have asked to use it but unfortunately we had to turn them down for now since there are still a few steps that are somewhat manual, and my time is currently prioritized for research work so I can't really clean up that last 10% and make it releasable right now.

That's not a bad system. However, I have to grade on the paper directly and I don't want a computer near me if possible when I correct. Too many distractions. I just grade each question then I add them all up if I predict the grade is gonna be bad or I subtract if the grade's gonna be good.

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