What's the longest time you've had to wait for a grade?

I turned in a project that was due on November 1st, and I just got my grade. It seemed like a long time to wait (just over 3 weeks). Is this normal for a big project? I don't like waiting a week for my exam grades either; it's a scantron, for goodness' sakes. Run it through the machine already! :angryfire

Kelly

[Italia13 RN]

I hear ya kelly, I have waited 3hrs to almost 3 weeks to get exam grades back. I think it depends on the teacher who made the exam. The one teacher who got our scores back in 3 hrs knew that she taught us all the material in class, she knew exactly where the question was from the book and from her power point notes so she felt confident in posting her test scores so quick because she knew that none of her questions would be thrown out. I think the others take so long because they go over the test multiple times to see whether or not they were good questions.. well thats what i think anyways, b/c every exam i get back they always throw atleast 1 question out! Just stay calm, they will be posted soon, Hopefully!

[student456]

we handed in a paper on freaking november 5th! and we just got an email saying that we wont be getting it back until january 8th because they have found problems with our essays and want to spend extra time going over them

WTH! lol im so mad - its worth 25% of our grade...grrr

[Conrad283, BSN, RN]

Well, if your class is 30 students and every student hands in a paper, it's going to take some time to review and grade them, that's why they're due early November, so the grade is done in time for final grades.

My school does group paper instead of individual papers. We handed them in on Wed and should have a grade on Monday.

The longest I've had to wait for a grade is midterm and final. We have our tests on Tuesday and have to wait until Monday to get the grade.

[llg, PhD, RN]

I have 60 students in the class I teach. Let's say I actually read all 60 of the papers they write carefully and try to give constructive feedback. That will certainly take 30 minutes per paper ... for a total of 30 solild hours of reading and writing for me, not counting breaks, etc. In other words, it will take me a full week of work to get them graded. That's 5 workdays in addition to all my other work-related responsiblities. (I only teach 1 course as I have a full time hospital job.)

If I'm lucky and work really really hard, I will be able to get all the papers graded and returned to the students back in 3 weeks.

[MB37]

Yeah, I get irritated if I have to wait for an exam grade - as long as it's scantron - but not at having to wait for a paper grade to come back. I'd rather my instructors spend a little effort giving me good feedback and the grade that I deserve. That's one complaint I have currently though - I turned in a paper a few weeks ago, the grade was recently posted, but it's an online class and she didn't post or e-mail back a graded copy. We have to incorporate that paper into our final paper that's due in two weeks, so I did just e-mail her asking if it would be possible to get a graded copy. She posted a general comment saying that "most people" only missed points for grammar, so if I made a couple of errors I'd like to fix them before I turn it back in (this was a lit review, we have to describe a hypothetical research study on the same topic for the final).

[PeachyERNurse, BSN, RN]

Turned in an assignment Sept. 30, and just got my grade last week:uhoh3:

[sailornurse]

Well it does depend on the assignment, the length of the paper etc. It takes me about one hour for the "big" care plan for my med-surg II class.

Other assignments such as the teaching plan take about 20 minutes each.

And it is much easier to grade a well written assignment then the ones that are missing parts of the grading criteris.

As for the exams run through the scantron. Yeah sure, running them through the scantron is not the time consumming part. It is the item analysis part. At our school, the scantron program analyzes each question, give us statistical data to help determine if a question was solid (good questionr) vs. a question that was poorly phrased (did most of the students answer incorrectly) what percentage????

Test analysis usually takes me a couple of hours plus reviewing each question for validity. Posting grades takes another hour.

So depending on what other classes an instructor has, if they also do clinicals it may be a few days, but as a rule for me 5 days for posting exam grades.

I did give a test once and had grades posted by 10 pm that night, it took me all afternoon to get this done but it was midterm grades, so it had to be done.

[llg, PhD, RN]

And it is much easier to grade a well written assignment then the ones that are missing parts of the grading criteris.

QUOTE]

AMEN to that! A well-done paper or assignment is a joy to read and easy to grade. All the key elements that you are looking for are there and easy to identify. It's the poorly written ones that take most of my time. I fear giving a poor grade to someone who doesn't deserve it. So I go over their work several times, trying to find some reason to give them points here and there. It takes way, way more time to give a bad grade than a good grade.

I wish all my students did great work. It would be so much easier for me to give them all A's -- and so much more fun.

[MikeyJ, RN]

I don't mind professors taking a few days to return a scantron exam day. My professors are very good about doing "question analysis" after grading exams. Meaning, they really take their time to figure out if students misread questions, if questions were worded poorly, or if the material was not presented correctly. They only do this analysis on questions that were marked wrong by a considerable amount of students. Because regardless of whether or not the professor feels they presented the material correctly, some of their questions may be written very poorly and can be misleading. Thus I respect those professors who are able to admit that they wrote a poor question and analyze whether they should throw out the question.

[krenee]

I don't mind professors taking a few days to return a scantron exam day.

I wouldn't mind that either, but ours takes 7 days . . . every time. It's hard to wait to see how I did.

I have to admit I'm spoiled from taking online classes for my prereqs - every test I took, I knew immediately what my score was. Something to be said for instant gratification!

Kelly

[APBT mom, LPN, RN]

We usually get our tests back the same day we take it and if something happens and we don't I swear over the half the class starts complaining about how they have to know their grade. The longest I ever had to wait for a grade was three weeks and that was a resume, cover letter, thank you letter, and three job ads that we found in the paper. On top of that their were three instructors grading these for 50 students. Big disappointment when we got the grades and they refactored everything percent wise and it was only worth 5 percentage points if done correctly.