There were fewer students present this time around … but I don't think they were frightened off by the assessment! I'd heard from three of them that circumstance prevented their attending, and I'm going to organise a new meeting next week for those that had to miss the meeting.
Most of the activity was concentrated on the presentations themselves (you can read about the formalities of that on the How to Pass! page within the Business Pages section of the course web site. These assessments pose something of a lesson-planning problem, since you have to give each student enough time to present, to ask questions and to receive feedback. Everyone who presented exceeded the limit of 5 minutes by about 30 seconds (they were very regular!), and each 'package' (of presentation and feedback) took about 10 minutes in all. That means that a group of 24 students would need the entire two hours in order to present.
As it was, we started with a warm-up, and finished with some practice for the role play exam next time around, so you would realistically need 2.5 hours to assess 24 students.
This assessment process makes very high demands on the teacher. You have to be fully concentrated all the time, and be able to give both instant and detailed feedback, whilst managing to record everything, and avoiding making statements to the students which bring them down, rather than lifting them up! Who says men don't have simultaneous capacity! I prepared a new layout on the course database (and upgraded it this morning), to make my marking clearer both to me and to the students. I showed everyone a copy of my marksheet before they began.
This morning I added a field for my detailed comments, and so was able to generate a .pdf document for each student with her mark and my comment on it. I refrained from giving numerical marks publicly yesterday evening. This is an ethical question for me: specific judgements should be made privately, in my opinion, although making more general statements about how I felt they did is part of my public job.
I haven't heard yet what the students think about my marking and feedback … but I daresay I will soon!
One magic moment last night was when one of the students let us all know where she was in real life last night. She usually logs in from her office just across the yard from where I sit … but last night she was at her sister's house just outside Tel-Aviv in Israel! We wouldn't have know if she hadn't told us …
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