Professors’ Perspective: Marking and Grading

Unless the course material is something like math, marking and grading can be an extremely subjective topic. Here are some tips from a professors’ perspective on how you can best improve your grades:

· If there is a particular style guide that your professor would like you to use, try to read and understand that style guide thoroughly. Your professor will probably be using it to judge your work, this will help you to follow the style he or she likes
· Ask your professor if they are willing to review your assignments before you hand them in. If they agree, this will help you to get the highest marks you can
· If your professor will not agree to review your work before submission, there are writing centres on most campuses that can help you to improve your writing and catch flaws or errors in your assignments
· Before you hand in assignments, make sure you read your work out loud to catch any errors you may have made – this will greatly improve the flow and the quality of your work – plus, make sure that you have not made any typos
· It is also a good idea to get someone else to read your work as well. There is that old saying that “two eyes are better than one.”

If at any time you are unsure of a mark you have received and would like to question your professor about it, feel free to do so – these are your rights as a student. Professors are not perfect and they make mistakes too. Marking and grading is a difficult thing to do and sometimes there is always that margin of error where a professor gets an assignment and does not really know what mark or grade to put on it.

One foolproof way to make sure you get the best grades you can is making sure your work is clear and simple. If you try to sound smart – you are probably shooting yourself in the foot and actually damaging the kind of mark you could get. If you keep your writing plain, simple, clear and something that anyone could understand – you will make sure you are communicating your ideas clearly. This is what makes the difference between an A+ and a B-.

Plus, if you are proud of the work you have done – your professor will be too.

Professor’s Perspective: Teaching in the summer

Some professors work through the fall and the winter just waiting for their time off in the summer. Other professors really enjoy teaching in the summer.

For those professors who teach in the summer, this could provide a tremendous opportunity.

If it is your first time teaching, the summer time may a good time to get used to your new work environment, get to know your colleagues and enjoy your time with your students in better weather. Teaching in the summer is an advantage for many new professors, as well as students, because worries about needing to cancel a class due to weather conditions are minimized.

The weather may even be so lovely that you can choose to change the classroom environment to outdoors in a quad, go on field trips and feel more encouraged to hang around the campus to get to know the school community better.

The summer is also a great time to get part-time or adjunct work with a college or university. You may have a more flexible work schedule and be able to devote a few hours to a course here or there.

Students can be at an advantage by taking summer school. Professors tend to be more relaxed and in a better state of mind than other times of the year. This may also translate into the kind of grades you would receive. As well, for students, it helps to get some of those extra credits or missed credits to either help you stay on course with your studies, or advance further so you would have more time for things like work and internships later on.

For professors who are fully established with the institution or institutions they work for…summer time is a great one to teach at your best. Usually with a lighter course load, there is more opportunity to either focus on the courses you have to teach, and/or to work on other projects that are important to you. These could be projects around the home, research, writing and projects related to work. You just may find that a project you start in the summer is something that you will carry with you throughout the year.

Private Versus Public Education

In many countries, the public education system can seem so under-funded that when it comes to primary and secondary schooling – there seems to be no other choice but to put your child through private school. Here are some things to consider about a public school you may want to put your child into.

If the school you are looking at does not have these things, you may want to consider sending your child to private school:

· Does the school have a strong second language-learning program, such as French that is highly regarded in Canada, or Spanish that is highly regarded in the United States?
· What are the test scores coming from the current students of the school?
· What is the physical education system like at the school?
· Does the school offer a travel club so your child may experience educational and supervised trips at a reduced cost?
· What is the quality of the reading materials at the school?
· What tend to be the percentage of students from the school that go onto post-secondary education?
· Does the school have a fine arts and music program?

There may be a number of other things that you would want from your school and make sure you have it. If not, perhaps private school may be the best thing for you.

Working From Home as a Professor

Professors that work in traditional settings sometimes need to work from home. Also there are professors that are teaching online education courses that also need to work from home. Here are some ways you can make sure you get your work done.

The key is keeping distractions to a minimum. You may want to start with making sure you are not in a room where a television set is so you become distracted with an engaging program that may be on air. If the space you live in is rather large, you can always keep the television on in another room for when you take breaks.

Try to make sure you have call display on your home office telephone. This will make sure that you can answer important calls, plus avoid unimportant calls that may be from people such as telemarketers for example. This will also help to keep your productivity high.

Make sure you keep a clean and organized space. This will help you to get the most work done. As well, to guard against any technical difficulties on the job, you may want to invest in an external hard drive so you can transfer documents from your desktop and/or laptop just in case your computer may crash. You can also e-mail important documents to yourself where you can have the opportunity to create virtual storage space of your files.

Keeping Your Office at Home and Work Organized

A professor needs to have an office that is organized to stay on top of all the work you need to do.

One way of making sure you keep your office at work organized is to make sure you do keep a lot of papers and assignments hanging around. Take the time to neatly organize these assignments and file them away. One way you can avoid dealing with paper at all is to maintain a paper-free assignment policy with your students. If you use e-mail to have students send you their assignments and mark it using tools in Microsoft Word, this will make sure that you do not have a lot of paper to deal with in your work.

Another way to make sure you are keeping your work environment organized is to make sure your keyboard is clean, as well as the telephone and anything else you may share with other professors. Even if you do not share these facilities, it is still a good idea to keep them clean.

At home, make sure you empty out your waste basket and give a good sweep to the floor of your home office. It is ideal to have home office space, or to at least designate an area as your work space. Make sure you keep all documents organized and file – it is extremely useful to have a filing system and cabinet in your home office, as well as something like this at work.

Getting an International Experience Online

There are ways of traveling the world, right from the convenience of your chair in front of your computer at home.

If you are interested in studying abroad without paying the plane fare (especially with rising oil prices), you may want to consider studying at a school abroad online. Australia is a country that has many of these types of programs.

Griffith University is one of them. You can study online to achieve higher degrees, however you may need to go to visit the school to do a residency requirement if you are doing a degree such as a PhD. The University of Western Sydney is another university where you can such an experience as studying abroad from home. Charles Sturt University is another option, however with this one you may not need to do a residency requirement in order to do a PhD.

The possibilities will become more and more endless in the future as more international universities begin to offer courses online so they can reach students from around the globe. If you are interested in such opportunities, take the time to do your research. You may even have opportunities on the campus where you are presently at to find out about studying abroad programs that you can actually do online. Some of the advantages are that you can still continue to lead your life in your hometown – not missing out on a family, a girlfriend or boyfriend, and your friends. As well, you can make sure your existing contacts will help you to get viable work and spend some of that money on higher education that will help to advance your career.

Making the Decision to Go Online

Walden University has recently come out with a report that Hispanics in the United States are attending their university in droves.

The Hispanic population in the United States is greatly underrepresented when it comes to higher education. Schools such as Walden University give underrepresented groups the opportunity to still obtain higher education and to improve their chances in the workforce when other more traditional institutions may not. There are some good and bad points to this kind of thing.

Walden University is an accredited online university, however does not have the same kind of credibility as a school such as Harvard, Cornell or Columbia. Sometimes in academic circles and in the world of work, the school you graduated from is just as important as the degree you receive. Do schools like Walden University actually make it possible for underrepresented groups to get a foothold in the world of work?

Well, apparently it seems as though it does. Many Hispanics are choosing schools such as Walden because it is giving them a greater advantage in the workforce. As online universities such as Walden become increasingly more credible over time, which is likely to happen, the stigma of studying online will start to go away and schools such as Walden will be seen as a viable alternative to schools such as Harvard.