Well, the grading is done. Okay, all of the grading isn’t done, but the batch of Shakespeare exams I got on Friday is (I just got a batch of my own students’ papers today…).
The title of this post is my favorite of the comments I wrote in response to a large set of abysmally incorrect answers to one particular passage identification question. Whoever it was who had written that answer had clearly only read the Cliff’s notes, and he/she hadn’t even done that well enough to figure out who was a Greek and who was a Trojan (a pretty important issue in Troilus and Cressida).
Grading these exams is kind of weird. Usually when I grade exams, they are written by my own students, and even if I grade them anonymously, I can usually tell whose they are by their word choice, ideas, and sophistication. But this Shakespeare grading gig is just a side job, and I never ever meet any of the students or even sit in on the classes. So where I normally have a lot of context for the ideas that are scrawled across the pages of the blue books, in this case I have literally none.
Grading with no context can actually be pretty fun, though, especially when students make funny mistakes or write strange messages to their mysterious grader. I always make a list of these surprising and amusing finds, and I thought that once again I’d share them with you. I should make it clear, before I list them, though, that I fully recognize my own capacity to make similar mistakes. In-class exams are a very weird thing, and the time pressure combined with a general lack of sleep are more than enough to produce the kinds of mistakes I discovered in these exams.
Still, they’re pretty funny.
Here are some of the spelling mistakes and malapropisms:
- “glimps” (some sub-class of woodland creatures?)
- “Laertese”(a technical language for over-zealous, vengeful sons?)
- “subcumbing” (I’m not even going to try on this one…)
- “fidelious” (??)
- [and, the one that takes home the prize:] “Ophallia” (I couldn’t stop laughing when I read this one. Oh, I thought, how appropriate in so many ways…)
Students also find some interesting ways of articulating their ideas when they’re embroiled in the mid-term pressure cooker:
- “This passage is one of many where Hamlet chews his mother out for being somewhat of a whore.” (As Tiffany has already observed, at least she isn’t a total whore.)
- [Again about poor Gertrude, the partial whore] “She simply desires sex too much and can’t wait to be with Claudius.”
- [And more broadly...] “All the while I was reading these plays throughout the semester a thought that [kept] coming back to my head was, I wonder if Shakespeare had really bad luck in love?” Indeed.
- [And explaining Caesar's decision to stay at home] It was “on account of” Calpurnia’s “statue-bleeding dream.” Very succinctly put.
Finally (and this one makes me kind of sad), someone wrote me this note at the end of her exam: “Sorry, This is awful. I have a fever. Perhaps you’ll have a good laugh?” It wasn’t actually all that bad, and I admit that this little note convinced me to have mercy on her.
