Exam Exaltation

Lost in the land of grading exams. After a week, I've finally found my way out. It's a lonely world in the land of poorly constructed sentences, verb conjugations and plagiarism. I started to fear that my own English skills were being degraded with each exam I corrected. Never mind the paper cuts and adding skills I've accumulated over the last week. (I'm a human calculator slash Edward Band-Aid Hands.) I had to document my efforts; notice the pens to show the scale. I am starting the 'Mia Raises Funds for CMU to Purchase a Freaking Scantron Machine Foundation.' I've started it using my own salary. For those who don't know Scantron, it's a beautiful machine in which you feed bubbled-in answer sheets into it and it will count the correct answers in less than a second. I will even provide all the #2 pencils the school would need for the next 10 years. And sharpen them.

Not to mention that the teachers are provided with sets of blank printed Excel grids that we must record our students' grades by hand. Then we submit these grade sheets to a person who will enter them (by typing every last number and decimal point) into an Excel file. I had actually made a suggestion to the department on how to make this process more efficient, but the department said that chiseling the grades onto a slab of stone would be too expensive. Oh and don't let me forget, when I submitted my grade sheet, I explained that I switched two of the columns by accident, but made a note on the paper. I was handed a bottle of white-out and told that it would 'confuse the typist' if I didn't fix it. Holy archaic system, sometimes I wonder if this is a sick joke.