Now I stop and think about marking...

In the last week or so I have worked out that I have marked assignments or presentations from close to 200 students. When I stop and think about it, that seems slightly worrying to me - is it right that I, as a doctoral student, have influence on so many people's degrees?

In my undergraduate degree I got a 2.1. It was a high 2.1 but a 2.1 nonetheless. I've found during my later academic pursuits that sometimes I have been restricted by not having achieved a first during my time at undergraduate level. Realising now how much marking and extra tutoring is taken on by postgraduate students, I really hope that my decisions to give someone 68 rather than 71 don't have such consequences?

Just to clarify, I don't think like that when I'm actually marking; I don't think you can afford to otherwise allocating each grade would be an incredibly long process...

On reflection of my undergraduate times, I think maybe I did deserve that 2.1 - I could definitely have applied myself better to my work, especially when I didn't engage with a particular subject so much and wasn't so interested in it (computer architecture springs to mind!) If I'd carried on study straight after finishing undergraduate, I wouldn't have the motivation and drive that I have now, so its funny how it all works out. And that 2.1 does help push me when I'm flagging a bit - just a bit more effort then and I could have done better, to get a first? Definitely helped me in my masters - just a bit more effort...!

from negative to positive

My recent blog posts have been concentrating on good intentions - what I could do better from now on. Maybe its time to take a step back and concentrate on what I did achieve academically last term, even with the very heavy demands on my time.

1. I wrote my first journal paper!! Just waiting to see if it gets accepted. The paper was a follow-on from the interdisciplinary Musicology conference in Greece that I went to last summer (CIM08), and of course it couldn't just be a rewrite of the conference paper. The original conference paper presented a musical accompaniment program which used artificial intelligence to track the performer being accompanied, and play the accompaniment to fit their performance. I extended this work by interviewing 8 human accompanists and comparing my artificial accompanist to the typical strategies that I found from the interviews. How on earth I got time to do these interviews I'll never know, but I was really pleased with the results. I'll talk about this more when I hear back the feedback from the journal reviewers. It's in for the Journal of New Music Research. fingers crossed...
2. I got masses of experience in teaching and marking... At the start of the term I was quite nervous about marking computer science type scripts, but given the amount of marking I did last term this is now definitely not an issue for me.
3. Job with Open University. Somehow I found enough time to apply for, and get, a tutor job with the Natural and Artificial Intelligence course for the Open University. I'm just waiting now to see if enough students enrol in the South East England region to justify running the course this February.
4. After seeing the ESCOM conference for 2009 (European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music) and especially seeing the keynote speakers - David Huron, Ani Patel, Marc Leman and others - I really want to get to this conference. So submitting two abstracts (one talk, one poster) was a major thing for me to do last term. I need to work on what I submitted, to get the work mature enough for this conference, but now that I'm finding more time, these two abstracts give me concrete structures to work around.

That's all that springs to mind right now, but it's been quite good to filter out some points that I'm really pleased with from last term: adds a positive note to the blog as well.