IS EXAM STRESS ONLY FOR LEARNERS?

Have you ever considered this?

When thinking of examinations the first thing people think about is the amount of stress the students have to go through. The heaps of content they must go through, the hours of studying and long hours of the actual writing of the exam papers.

What I find astonishing is the lack of thought for the educators who have to set or in the case of external papers, have to moderate those papers. I know that doesn't sound like much work, granted but minor details are important for the success of the exam. This is just the beginning.

It's stressful for all of us

If it is stressful for a learner who has to write ten exam papers, how stressful is it for a teacher to mark only one of those papers for three grades of five classes of fifty learners per class? That is 250 papers the teacher has to mark within a specified time period which is normally two days. If there is time and the subject is written earlier in the examination timetable, a teacher can be fortunate enough to have three days to mark.

I'm not sure of how other schools around the world work but in South Africa a teacher can teach up to four subjects at once. A practical example is I teach English First Additional Language, Geography, History and Creative Arts. These can get a bit much to handle at once.

Juggling them all

English and History were both written today. One was written at 8 o'clock in the morning and the other at 11 o'clock. They are both my subjects so I need to be done marking them both in three days. That is 300 scripts to mark in three days whilst attending to my regular duties of teaching and class management.
These are the papers I am marking now. There's no space on my desk.

Tomorrow another English and Geography papers are going to be written. That's an additional 300 scripts to my workload. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the work ends at marking. Oh no. There's more.

The processes that follow

After marking there's a process called "Item and error analysis". What happens at this stage is that the entire exam paper for each learner gets analysed to check which questions proved difficult for the learner and what could have led to that difficulty. After identifying the errors, strategies need to be developed right there and then to combat those errors. All of this takes place within the first two to three days after the paper was written.

What follows is simple but still frustrating part of recording the marks by hand of every learner. This may seem like a mundane task but after everything else it's quite irritating. After the marks are recorded and submitted for evaluation, they come back to the teacher and then the process of punching in the marks into a computer program begins.

I can literally type of this all day but I believe I've made my point. Me writing this post is a way of venting. I needed to take a breather from marking and thought steeming about it would be a good way to release some tension.

In part two of this post I will be giving tips and advice of how to deal with the mountains of scripts to be marked and how to lessen the stress.

Now it's time for me to get back to work.