- PhD qualifying exams were scored this week, and all but one passed. Of the passing grades, though, only one really impressed me. One wonders what the qualifying exam will measure that coursework will not, though perhaps it's the speed with which it is measured...The student who failed gets to try again in the spring. Lucky student. Lucky me, too, who gets to read the next 25-page attempt.
- I am at this moment wading through undergrad exams. I wish I knew of a way to really measure what I want to measure without wading through pages and pages of handwritten text. That said, some students are actually exercising their capacity for original thinking in this exam, not just regurgitating my own words. Although the regurgitation abounds.
- I am in the middle of grading seminar papers, and here, I must say, I am stuck. What, at the 700-level, distinguishes a B+ paper ! from an A-? This to me, is an unanswerable, but absolutely crucial question. What about a paper that applies the obvious (but complex) theory to an already overdone text? It adds nothing to the current discussion, but it is sound, well-written and thoughtful. What about the structural and stylistic mess that is based on a fundamentally brilliant premise, but is two or three really good revisions (expand, unpack, rephraser) away from a life beyond this iteration? What about the clever, stylish, smart paper that needs beefing up with theoretical rigor? What about the metholodological experiment that is executed well, but seems to turn out to have been not worth the energy because it yielded results largely predictable without the methodological brouhaha? Fortunately, there are two flat-out brilliant papers in the batch. At least I know what an A looks like.
rephraser
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