Like Riding a Bike

The class that I'm TAing this semester wrote a quiz during the last class.

The whole set-up was a recipe for disaster.

The quiz was much too long: three essay questions in twenty minutes. Then the prof decided that I should grade half of the quizzes and the other TA should grade the other half of them. And neither of us was given any instructions or guidelines on how to assign marks, so our grades differed significantly: the average in my batch of quizzes was 50% and the other TA's average was 66% (a passing grade is 70%).

No matter how you looked at the situation, the grades clearly would need adjusting. And the prof decided that it would be my job to make all of the adjustments (this prof has never been any good at math, so it's probably just as well!).

Many lifetimes ago, I worked in a hospital on a project that required me to work with numerical data on a huge spreadsheet. I gained a fair bit of proficiency in using spreadsheets.

I have never been so thankful for this work experience as I was today because the prof wasn't sure what kind of average we should adjust the grades to and had me do the calculations about five different ways. Fortunately, some quick entry of data and various formulae was all that was needed to make each set of adjustments

The moral of the story?

Working with a spreadsheet is like riding a bike: you never forget how.