Marking with Markin

For weeks I have had the program Markin 4.0 on my computer, but I have not come around to using it until today. I had some problems at first finding out how to actually open the students' work in a way that let me use the program, but after some frustrating minutes I finally managed to make it work. My first impression is that this program can actually help me a lot in the future. I do not think it will revolutionise the way I assess the papers, but I believe the students will get much better and more detailed feedback than I have been able to give them earlier. Including statistics that can show them black on white the frequency of certain mistakes will hopefully show them that I have a point when I mention these mistakes in my comments, and including links to resources on the web where they can find more information on the issues can also help some overcome these mistakes and errors. Correcting papers is still a time consuming activity, and I do not belive Markin can help me speed the process up all that much, but if it can help the students get rid of some of the most frequent mistakes, it will, as time goes by, be of great help to me in the future.

Thank God, it’s Friday, by the way. Wish you all a pleasant weekend. I already know how I will spend most of mine – correcting more papers using Markin 4.0!