[throwaway35777]

I was a grader once. I guarantee if someone gives a good answer they'll get full marks even near the bottom of the stack. For BS answers I'll admit I got less generous as the hours went on.

No one's getting hurt by this system if it's randomized. It's a matter of graders giving out partial credit for wrong answers which is discretionary. Rarely students are granted a small mercy. Seems OK.

[dunham]

I was one of many TAs for a large math class in college (pre-calc - think high school math for college students). For uniformity, the prof had the partial credit down to a science - specifying points for getting certain aspects of the problem. For the finals, a few TAs would be assigned to a given page, for uniformity.

The fascinating thing was that the distribution of grades was about the same every year.

And I had a math prof for analysis who would give negative points for BS answers. You could say “I need X but don’t know how to prove it” in the middle of a proof, but if you made up something that was incorrect, you’d get negative points.

[hilux]

Oh, that brings back memories! "For every epsilon, there is a delta ..."

[bumby]

>For BS answers I'll admit I got less generous as the hours went on.

What do you think is the cause of this? Do you become more cynical (and less generous) because you’ve seen so many BS answers previously? Is it just that getting fatigued makes you less generous?

[ihaveajob]

When I was a TA in grad school, I noticed the same. Early on I thought some BS answers were at least kind of funny, and I gave them the benefit of the doubt, maybe giving more attention to the parts that were correct. After I saw similar answers later on, the novelty wore off and I was probably less amused, so the inclination to be lenient disappeared. Sometimes I went back to previous decisions if I remembered them, to be fair, but I don't think I always remembered since the volume could be high (grading 80 exams in a row is TEDIOUS).