The 6 Stages of Multiple Choice Grading

There are stages your brain and body go through when grading papers. I have 320 listening tests to grade, luckily it's multiple choice. I've graded all sorts of things from essays, letters to the new ALT (me), to listening tests and debates, but they all have different physical and mental stages you go through while grading... here are the stages for multiple choice...


1) The Burst
You begin with a massive stack of papers. "Wow, that's a lot!" you tell yourself except you aren't really that intimidated by it, you almost see it as a challenge. It will take 5 or 6 to memorize the answer key, maybe more or less depending on how many questions there are. You memorize it in chunks though. The first half is CCCA the second half is BAAA the last two are AB. It's not so hard and your brain grades them in a burst. You can make a big dent in the grading in this part. I did 120 in 40 minutes. There is a kind of sadistic love you have for getting a paper that has many wrong answers. "HAHAHAHAH! SO MANY X'S MUAH HAHAHAHAHAH!" someone gets 20/20 and you think "WELL, WELL, WELL, LOOK AT MS. SMARTY PANTS HERE! SOME of these are true or false and you must have just lucked out on the 50% chance of getting it right... looks like you lucked out in this class..."

2)The Donkey and the Carrot
Stage 2 begins now but won't end until your pile of papers are graded. This stage is you mentally put a stick over your head with whatever "carrot" you can think of hanging from the end. Usually it starts with pretty realistic rewards like, "I have a piece of candy in my backpack."

3) Early Hypnosis
The process starts to become slightly hypnotic. You will grade a few tests and not really remember grading them, however you are aware that you are starting to become hypnotized. You no longer looking at specific answers, rather the shapes on the page. You can recognize if that someone circled three Cs in a row followed by one A. The first half of the page makes a kind of backwards L shape, the seco half makes a kind of F shape, the last two make a diagnal line. You are aware that you're brain is starting to do this though and you will make some mistakes. Though you will catch these mistakes you wonder if you have missed any. When you look at the stack of 180 already-graded papers next to you, you decide that you probably didn't miss any and continue to grade. Sometimes you'll write 16/20 when you meant to write 18/20. So many students get 20/20, 16/20, or 18/20 that when someone gets 10/20 it's confusing and you must break your rhythm and hypnosis in order to fully count how many are right and how many are wrong. "One...two...three...four...five wrong. One... two... three...four...five right. ...that definitely is 10 out of twenty points..." This is the stage where you start to get angry at anyone who doesn't get 20/20 "WHAT? you got number 4 wrong?? REALLY? The MOST APPROPRIATE ANSWER is A... definitely NOT B!" You will quickly reenter your early-hypnotic shape-recognizing stage though. At this stage too, your carrot has started to change shape... a piece of candy in your backpack is no longer worth the next 200 papers, but your lunch is. You can't eat lunch until all papers are finished.

4) Full hypnosis
Now you don't even know you're grading papers. You don't even know you're awake. You aren't sure where you are but you aren't really worried about that. You hands are circling problems and writing the total points but you don't even know how it's happening. You aren't aware you are hypnotized. The Lunch you are using as your "carrot" no longer is valuable. You do, however, have to pee... really bad. This is your new "carrot." No bathroom breaks until you finish all of them... you are getting more desperate.

5) The Break into Black Hole Thinking
When you have 20 left, you suddenly realize that you are nearing the end. The hypnosis breaks and you enter "Black Hole Thinking" mode. If you were to watch someone or something enter a black hole, the light that it emits would appear to be going slower and slower each moment never reaching the center of the black hole. This is essentially what happens to the tests. You can see everything in slow motion. You continue to get through the tests at a rapid pace, however your brain has changed its way of seeing them... each test feels twice as long in actual length and each test feels like it takes twice as long to grade... As for the carrot, you are now intentionally torturing yourself a little bit in order to give your "carrot" more value. Your pee has hidden retreated back into a place that makes it so you aren't a balloon about to burst .... but if you sit in a certain way your back hurts, suddenly it makes you have to pee more AND your legs fall asleep. This is a very valuable position. You want to move, especially since with your legs asleep you can't really tell if you are actually peeing on yourself or not...

6) Finished
Give me my candy, my lunch, my bathroom break, and let the blood back into my lower half... Now what? I still have 7 more hours left of work.... I wish I had gone slower on those tests... I don't even remember grading them...

You check the answer key one last time "CCCA BAAAAB"... did you grade that way the whole time? Yes, of course you did... wait... did you? "Hmmm... I may have made a mistake...Naaaaaaah...wait..." You look at the 2 foot pile of tests on your desk, not a chance in hell you're cracking that pile back open for a second guess.