McGee doesn’t mind grading papers over summer

By WILL STEWART / Staff Reporter for the Southern Standard

MC GEE

While grading tests during summer vacation may not sound very appealing to many educators, high school teacher Chad McGee said he was all too happy to spend a week recently grading AP exams in San Antonio, Tex.

McGee, who teaches advanced placement American history, joined 800 of the best high school American history teachers and college professors from across the United States and Canada to grade the approximately 750,000 AP American history exams.

The AP program, sponsored by the College Board, gives capable students the opportunity to take rigorous college-level courses and examinations while still in high school. Should these students pass their respective end-of-course AP exams, they are eligible to receive college credit.

While a computer graded the multiple choice sections of the exams, it was up to McGee and his colleagues to read and score the time-consuming free response and essay portions of the exams.

After about a half-day of training, the educators spent seven days (working seven hours a day) reading and scoring the essays. McGee spent all of this time reading and scoring some 1,500 essays evaluating the impact of the Civil War on political and economic developments in the North, South and West between 1865 and 1900, and the responses of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration to the problems of the Great Depression.

“It was a great experience, although it was a little bizarre. It was very mechanical, like an assembly line, just reading our portion of the questions day after day,” he said, adding it was actually more fun than it sounds. “I’d definitely do it again.”

“What I learned there will definitely benefit my students,” he said. By reading essay after essay, he said, he got a better idea of several things he can do to better prepare them for the exam, like how to best organize their arguments and their supporting evidence in essay form.

“There are also some minor things, like handwriting. It may not be conscious, but after reading 1,500 essays it can make a difference. I’ll encourage my kids to write as clearly as they can,” he said.