Yesterday morning at 8 AM we had a foreigner faculty meeting to discuss new books and how the courses might be set up for next semester. Though there were some important matters, some stuff could not be addressed since the department hasn't created the master schedule for next semester yet, and we don't know how many of the 20 new teachers are actually going to show up in February.
I am interviewing the last of my students today, then a makeup listening test, and then I will have everything I need to finish the raw grading. I downloaded a PDF from the internet that explains how to do Excel spreadsheets. I asked for help at the uni, but nobody understood what I wanted, so I'll persevere and do it myself. We all have exactly the same 5 categories to include in our grading. I have all the raw scores notated for each of the 5 categories and just need to insert equations for the weight of each category so Excel can pop out the magic number at the end. Should be simple, but a template would have been nice to speed things up. My office computer has Vista Home Basic, and I don't have Excel on it$ The university system is in Korean, and Home Basic doesn't do multiple languages (and can't be forced to), so uploading the uni system spreadsheet to my office computer is impossible. I will have to use the head office computers. I have been a nervous wreck this week worrying about missing deadlines, forgetting to do things (which I have done already), figuring out how to organize the portfolio they started making us do, recording grades correctly, entering them into the system, and finishing up interview testing. I have had a continual headache and stomachache for over five days now. Some of the stuff is absolutely stupid, though, considering we teach conversation courses. These should be pass/fail, since there is no valid way to test whether a student has actually learned to converse better having attended class for 1,300 minutes (I'm being generous here!). We basically grade learners on how well they speak in general, not on whether they have improved over the semester. Indeed, how can we know whether they have improved since it takes a while to figure out their level of competence in the first place? Some students tank the placement test to ensure a high grade. Pass/Fail is the only fair way to construct these conversation courses. Some teachers give their learners even LESS instruction time since they have two weeks of midterms and two weeks (or more) of finals! So the learners sit in a class of 25 for 1,100 -1,300 minutes over the course of 16 weeks, which means IF each student gets an equal amount of attention, 4 minutes each class, he gets 50 minutes or so of the teacher's instructive attention over the course of 16 weeks. And then we have to assign a letter grade to him. Beyond the pale, if you ask me. If someone can rationally defend the current grading scheme, I'd love to hear it. I think it is so unfair considering the subject we teach as to be borderline unethical.
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