I work with Brits, Aussies, and Canucks. When my colleagues grade student efforts, they never refer to it as grading: they call it marking. So I guess that's what I'll be doing today: marking. There may well be Americans who also refer to grading as marking, but it's not a term that I ever heard with any frequency until I came to Korea.
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Tuesday, December 10, 2013
"marking"
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My parents used 'marks' more than 'grades' although I understood what they meant.
ReplyDelete(They were more grades to me than marks.)
This is interesting. I wonder if there's an age thing going on here somewhere....
You may be on to something. In the States, it could be a generational thing, whereas in Commonwealth territories, it could just be vestiges of the Queen's English.
ReplyDeleteAddofio here. I adopted the term "marking" when in the Peace Corps in Ghana, and kept it as a teacher educator back in the States because the truly energy-intensive aspect was commenting. Which is not grading. I used to figure if all I had to do was ascertain a grade for a paper, it'd take me half the time, but I could never restrain myself from that first comment, and if you comment on one student's paper, then you have to comment on them all. Currently am basking in perhaps the biggest reward of retirement--it's the end of the semester, and I have no papers to mark :-)
ReplyDeleteAddofio,
ReplyDeleteInteresting. So you take "marking" to refer to "marking up a paper," yes? But what are your thoughts on British profs who cry, "Full marks!" when a student is 100% correct about something? It would seem that, in such a context, marks = grades.
I don't know if I'd feel the same eating Mark A beef or eggs instead of Grade A beef and eggs. Anyway, marking sounds like something from the days before language when our prehistoric relatives made marks in the dirt with sticks. Nowadays, I think only the illiterate need to make their X "mark" or when ranchers brand cattle with their mark.
ReplyDeleteSadly, the worst thing about South Korea is the fact that there is very little I can do about children's marks--that'd be the marks on their bodies that indicate some sort of physical abuse at home or due to bullies. In the states, I'd be complicit, and maybe even arrested and imprisoned, if I didn't report suspected abuse. On the insane flip side, children in South Korea rarely get help, or know where to turn to, when they need it due to abuse, and there's very little that even a well-meaning foreigner can do to help them.