Under Examination

24 Ramadhan, 1439

I completed my quota of marking for the May IB paper I specialise in today, I'm happy to say. It's a bit of burden to begin each day with a target in mind of essays to complete, and even more so when all sorts of oddities can crop up in the team of which I'm in charge to derail progress. The responsibility for the team is still on-going, by the way, but it doesn't feel anything like as onerous now I'm in the clear on the personal front.

I suppose part of the burden is the sense of the importance of the marking for each individual taking the examination. I try and stay fresh for each essay, bearing in mind this is someone's attempt to do his or her best. But that can be difficult when a fair proportion of essays strongly suggest that their writers were not terribly bothered about how a marker will receive their efforts. At times work was not so much careless as determined to demonstrate a consummate lack of care for accuracy, or consideration for any reader. But these were a minority. And there was much to cheer in terms of students obviously finding value in what they'd read and sometimes real illumination in their texts. It's a bit much to expect this of every script, but I suppose that's what those who teach the texts are hopefully/hopelessly looking for.