I’ve been marking exam questions for 8 days. It was indeed a horrible experience. The paper was easy. It was a bonus paper for those who were competent in the language, yet, many students failed to answer it well. Marking the papers gave me much stress and really tested on my emotions. Firstly, I had a deadline to meet. I had to mark approximately 170 over scripts within 7 days. Every script consist of 9 comprehension questions, a formal letter, a cloze passage and an essay.
Secondly, I was disappointed to see the kind of mistakes the students still made despite being thought over and over again in class by their teachers over certain matters. The teachers who thought those students were more experienced than I was and yet, some failed to do well. I wondered how did my own students fared. I wondered if they failed to satisfy their examiners too. If they had, then perhaps I as their teacher had failed. I was anxious about their performance and at the same time wished I had done much more as their teacher during the semester. Nevertheless, I learnt a thing or two from the marking. I gained some new ideas on how to improve my teaching next semester.