Coordination!
The weeks of training with the teams gives us a chance to learn the styles and nuisances of each student. For instance, we have a student who always spells lemma as llema - causing us to draw llamas over his solutions. I'm happy to report that on the actual contest, he still spelt it llema...prompting us to draw another llama.
Spelling mistakes aside, that familiarity with the students is really crucial for us as we begin to mark the papers. It's what helps us determine the difference between a typo and a logical error, a fatal flaw or just a rabbit hole that too much time was spent on. To mark the papers, we are given marking schemes to follow. If a student follows the scheme, cool. Mostly they don't. For instance...every mock exam that contained one geometry problem actually meant we got 6 completely different approaches.
Now imagine if you are responsible for grading several hundred of them...at a competition where every single point can make or break a medal for a student. Stressful huh?
The way it works is that each problem on the exam has a set of coordinators and problem captains that are responsible for it. You defend against what they think the scores should be, and they are also trying to make sure they are consistent across all the countries. For each problem, we go in at the assigned time, we tell them what scores we think the students should get, and then we defend why they get those points. Any disagreements are worked on together - larger disputes goes to the problem captain, and then if they still cannot agree, to the jury of all countries.
Coordination was stressful for us. Constant watching the scoreboards, constant speculation on what the cutoffs will be, and constant speculation on if the jury will agree with you on tricky part marks. The highlight however, was when we helped Uganda defend a problem for 7 points instead of 6 (well, it was mostly Matt) - meaning that Uganda got its first Honorable Mention ever at the IMO.
We did have a bit if fun with the kids on guessing their grades, but at the end of every day we did go over and talk about their scores and the outcomes so they weren't waiting in suspense the whole time.
It was two days of coordination, then the final jury meeting.
The final jury meeting is where they determine the medal cutoffs for the competition. 6 options were presented, based on the number of medals given at each potential cutoff, and then the countries voted. Voting was sometimes via clicker (and hence anonymous), and sometimes done by raising your country sign. James, as leader, held the vote for Canada.
As soon as the vote goes through, the cutoffs are revealed and the results published immediately. I'm sure you know the results by now, so my next post won't be a surprise. However, I will include the photos I tried to snag of our team during and after the closing ceremonies.
Spelling mistakes aside, that familiarity with the students is really crucial for us as we begin to mark the papers. It's what helps us determine the difference between a typo and a logical error, a fatal flaw or just a rabbit hole that too much time was spent on. To mark the papers, we are given marking schemes to follow. If a student follows the scheme, cool. Mostly they don't. For instance...every mock exam that contained one geometry problem actually meant we got 6 completely different approaches.
Now imagine if you are responsible for grading several hundred of them...at a competition where every single point can make or break a medal for a student. Stressful huh?
The way it works is that each problem on the exam has a set of coordinators and problem captains that are responsible for it. You defend against what they think the scores should be, and they are also trying to make sure they are consistent across all the countries. For each problem, we go in at the assigned time, we tell them what scores we think the students should get, and then we defend why they get those points. Any disagreements are worked on together - larger disputes goes to the problem captain, and then if they still cannot agree, to the jury of all countries.
Coordination was stressful for us. Constant watching the scoreboards, constant speculation on what the cutoffs will be, and constant speculation on if the jury will agree with you on tricky part marks. The highlight however, was when we helped Uganda defend a problem for 7 points instead of 6 (well, it was mostly Matt) - meaning that Uganda got its first Honorable Mention ever at the IMO.
We did have a bit if fun with the kids on guessing their grades, but at the end of every day we did go over and talk about their scores and the outcomes so they weren't waiting in suspense the whole time.
It was two days of coordination, then the final jury meeting.
The final jury meeting is where they determine the medal cutoffs for the competition. 6 options were presented, based on the number of medals given at each potential cutoff, and then the countries voted. Voting was sometimes via clicker (and hence anonymous), and sometimes done by raising your country sign. James, as leader, held the vote for Canada.
As soon as the vote goes through, the cutoffs are revealed and the results published immediately. I'm sure you know the results by now, so my next post won't be a surprise. However, I will include the photos I tried to snag of our team during and after the closing ceremonies.
Thanks again for your blogging.
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