“Last semester, after waiting weeks for the midterm exam results, I confronted my professor and complained about the delayed feedbacks only to get an irritated look instead,” said Ryu Ha-jhong (Social Science, 1).
Ryu is not the only student who has complained about the problem of not being able to know her exam result right after exams. Every semester, many students have shown their displeasure through Ewhaian.com, an Internet community of Ewha students, regarding the difficulty of knowing how they did on their exams from professors. Students had to wait in despair for their exam results because some professors neglected to give them out due to various reasons such as excessive works.
Professor Park Chan-kil (English Literature) said that many professors try their best to grade the exams as soon as possible for the students who prefer to know how they did on their exams. Professors believe that in that way, students can improve themselves to get a better result on the next exam. However, Park added that there are some cases in which professors are late in grading students’ exam papers as professors can be scheduled with other associations or academic meetings. Also, unlike multiple choice questions with definite answers, short-answer questions or essay questions take longer to finalize the grades.
Besides the reasons of professors having other works to do and needing more time to grade the lengthy written answers, Park mentioned another significant reason that students should be aware of.
“Although professors understand that students want to know their grades as soon as possible, they do not want their students to be too sensitive about their grades because grades are not always everything to students,” said Park. “Some professors think that students’ learning attitude can change after getting disappointed with the low grades they did not expect through checking the results and believe that showing out grades continuously is not always the best choice,” said Park.
Many students believe that knowing their midterm exam results and receiving feedbacks afterwards is crucial in helping them understand how they are doing in class. “I was able to know my position in the course and decided to improve myself after the process of receiving feedbacks from professors after the midterm exam,” said Nam Sun-woo (Liberal Arts, 1).
Distributing exam results to students after exams can also be an advantage to professors in preventing confirming the exam results. “By going through the exam paper with my professor after the exam, I was able to discover a miscalculation in a wrongly corrected answer,” said Kim Ji-yeon (Journalism, 2).
For students who are in the position of trying to learn, knowing the results of exams as soon as possible seemed desirable to improve themselves in these ways.
“Even though it may be burdensome for professors, I believe that it will be effective if professors fix a particular hour with students to go over their results after exams,” said Ryu.
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