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Rant: How long should a professor be allowed to correct an exam...

A

AznMaverick

Platinum Member
My math professor has took more than 2 weeks, and is STILL not done grading my class' midterm exam. The first midterm exam was returned in 2 days. His excuse was..."I was feeling under the weather". Just kind of p!ssed, he is getting a bad review from me, not only because of this though...
 
Our school had limits on such things, grades had to be submitted by a certain time, so our professors only had like a day or two to finish them up.
 
Depends on how big a class, and if he has help grading. If it's a class with 50 people and he's doing all the grading, two weeks isn't unreasonable.
 
My math professor took 2.5 weeks to return our second midterm, and there are only about 30 kids in the class. We bitched the whole time and then found out that the reason it took so long was because her mom was dying in the hospital. We all felt bad afterwards...
 
I never understood the point of whining about getting exams back at any time other than right before the end of drop period...
 
Exams shouldn't take that long to grade IMO, but that is a relatively minor aspect to teaching a quality course. I'd hate to think that someone would slam a prof for 1 instance... that would be like a prof flunking a student because of one late assignment.
 
There was one professor in my dept that was just horrible about this. He would give multiple choice, 15 question, exams just to make grading easier for him and still never grade the test. Never. We always complained but do you know how much effect the evaluations really have for tenured faculty? It may cause a variation in the size of their yearly raise. That's it.
 
Two weeks could be a bit much, but it really depends on your class size, the format of the exam, and whether or not the professor has TA's helping him grade (as previously mentioned).

Remember, professors have lives, too, and those lives generally include publishing X number of articles/books per year at the school's request (on top of doing the actual research for said articles and book chapters), supervising doctoral students, taking part in whatever board they're on, etc. While it is a professor's obligation to grade exams and get them back to you in a timely fashion, try not to hold them to unrealistic expectations...especially if you have a large class and the test was essay-based.
 
as long as he wants to. lol

I like getting an exam/paper back before the next one is due so I at least have some idea going into it about what grade I need to get, but I'd never whine if a professor took his time getting something back to us.
 
Yea, i would like to get my exam back before finals (which is next week). Also, i'm not evaluating him negatively just based on this. He singles people out in class, can't explain concepts well, and doesn't speak loud enough in class (and this is a classroom, not a huge lecture room). Also, when i went to see him for help, he was not helpful, but made me feel rather stupid...
 
I had a professor in college who rarely gave exams back until weeks after we'd taken the NEXT exam.

This same professor had a policy of requiring you to retake an exam if you got less than an 80 on it (on your second try if you got over an 80 your grade became an 80; on the third try if you got over an 80 your grade became a 60; if you didn't get over an 80 by the third try... well I don't know what would happen, but imagine how long it'd take him to grade the same exam 3 times!)
 
Originally posted by: Whisper
Two weeks could be a bit much, but it really depends on your class size, the format of the exam, and whether or not the professor has TA's helping him grade (as previously mentioned).

Remember, professors have lives, too, and those lives generally include publishing X number of articles/books per year at the school's request (on top of doing the actual research for said articles and book chapters), supervising doctoral students, taking part in whatever board they're on, etc. While it is a professor's obligation to grade exams and get them back to you in a timely fashion, try not to hold them to unrealistic expectations...especially if you have a large class and the test was essay-based.
Click to expand...

Excellent response!

For the record, as a TA / adjunct I've always tried to grade ASAP. Two weeks strikes me as a very long time to wait for exam grading.
 
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