If one day I win the lottery, I will probably do the same as I do today, since I love what I do. Except one thing: I will not grade exams. I only do it for the money. The rest I do for love.
The main reason I hate grading is that I get stressed trying to be fair, and give the same grade to equivalent answers. There are some strategies to achieve a fair evaluation.
- I evaluate each question independently. I do not evaluate person by person, but by set of answers, one set for each question. That way I can see the full picture and compare answers.
- When I read the set of answers, I do not know the name of the person I’m grading. So I cannot be biased.
- When evaluating a set of answers, I read the first one on good mood but I get more and more unhappy at the end. So the first answer of each set may get a better grade than the last one. To avoid this, I start grading sometimes at the end and go backwards, and sometimes I start in the middle.
To be honest, bad English affects me negatively, so good answers seem not-so-good. In general, if an answer is correct but not clearly explained, the grade is 99.
Your part
The preliminary grades can be seen at the course’s Google Sheet. You can see each question set here:
- 1. Taxon
- 2. Entrez query
- 3. Algorithm v/s Heuristics
- 4. How BLAST works?
- 5. Existence/extension?
- 6. Word Size
- 7. Average Nucleotide Identity
- 8. Looking for a professor
I wrote my comments in boldface.
Please check your grades and let me know if I made any mistake. Send me an email before next week. I will wait for your comments until the last minute when I have to publish official answers.