Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Now I’m back to talking about the day before, although in the next few days I will probably recall some other details of the past weeks that I haven’t had the chance to relate here.

After I had checked all the test papers I needed to grade, I proceeded to give points to the students’ exercises in Graphics One, and giving them zero for any two or more submissions from different people but with the same date and time stamp (up to the second), as well as file size.

I have to thank the extended directory listing commands in the prompt-typing operating system for that, and the possibility of saving the listing into a file. If there’s a way to do that in the graphic file manager, I don’t know about it.

And it was only one easy step importing that file into a spreadsheet software, and sorting left and right, by date, time, student’s name, date submitted and exercise number.

In the end I had to fail ten students out of forty-two for passing work other than their own, or giving their classmates the opportunity to copy their work. Although in the latter category, there were still some who passed because of their excellent individual work that was not reproduced.

Trigonometry was worse. Sixteen out of forty one received a zero point zero grade, whose final percentages were in the twenties or thirties.

To be fair, four of those did not show up for the finals. Out of that four, two have a chance of passing if they took the test (the other two, I guess, just “gave up”). This includes the cousin of a student who got the highest grade from me in both Math 1 and Trigonometry the past two terms. I guess I will be trying to contact them to get them to take a special exam.

In my electricity and magnetism lecture class, I had to fail two students, one of which already knew his fate, the other, the son of the school dentist, who, I heard is planning to shift from engineering to a less technical course anyway. But I could not, in good conscience, let them take the succeeding higher electricity and electronics subjects if they haven’t shown ability to master the basics.

Everyone passed in the lab class. I attribute that to their high group report scores, which accounts for a third of the grade. Otherwise the range of 1.0 to 4.0 was only because of the results of their written finals and the quality of their written and oral reports.

I started giving the course cards to the students going to the faculty room as early as an hour before my scheduled distribution time. But I stayed in my allotted room for only thirty minutes instead of the hour and a half that was scheduled, leaving at the first five-minute lull when no students showed up.

After all it was only down the stairs from there to the faculty room (where I stayed the rest of the day outside of lunch) if they wanted to look for me.

There were also some engineering students who asked for academic advising in lieu of David, although it was just to add a subject or two. I’ll go into the particulars of that next time. For now, the term, and this post, are over.