Marking On-Line is Hardly Sublime!

The Covid19 pandemic naturally resulted in most my UK University teaching going onto Zoom (not my preferred medium but ho hum). My examinations for the taught modules went to the students by email. The scattered students proved capable of finding at least a dozen different ways of submitting the resulting work (although they were given careful guidance). Marking became horrendous. Some scripts were easily accessed: others less so. Some scripts could be edited for including comments/annotations but not all of them (so additional files had to be created). Matching student numbers and student names prior to adding grades, proved time consuming. I know it sounds feeble, but roll on the return to traditional examination papers! The electronic versions took twice as long to mark (and I get paid per script). It also seemed more likely that errors could creep into the process, when transcribing and re-transcribing. Checking and re-checking had to be done.