In a stunning bid to catch up with the 20th century, my University here in Not-Bielefeld mandated that from last Autumn onwards all examination administration was to be done online only. Paper-free exam administration as the name proudly proclaims. As an amateur technoweenie, I found the idea great. Nothing like a bit of superfluous technology to replace a system that’s working just fine as it is. And you know the replacement solution has to be great because it’s literally been in development for at least 10 years now that I know of.
But first a bit of background …
The working system as it stands is that each of my courses is organized as a module that can contain one or more classes. At the end of each semester, I tally up the grades for all the different exams in a module in Excel, print out the results including the final grade, duly sign the summary, and send it to the examination office where they enter the grades manually into the system.
Room for improvement? Obviously. After all, we’re talking about a system where electronic grades are converted to paper grades that are then converted back to electronic grades. Kind of a waste of time and effort, especially on the back end.
Enter paper-free exam administration. Ten plus years in the making to sort everything out.
On paper (if you’ll pardon the pun), it is indeed a wonderful idea. Instead of all this unnecessary digital to analogue to digital back-and-forth, we all just enter the grades directly into the University’s online teaching system and click to automatically and instantaneously send them directly to the examination office who then can also automatically and instantaneously publish the official grades to the students. German efficiency has never been so, well, efficient.
But, like I said, on paper …
There’s any number of problems with the system. For starters, students have to register online for each exam. And, every year, there’s at least one student who forgets to do this and so has to be added manually. I also have to manually enter each exam into the system and wait for it to be approved by the examination office. There’s also no way that I can see to differentially weight the different exams in a course. Or to include different grading schemes in a single exam summary. Or to carry over exams from previous years because some students didn’t complete the module in a single year. Or …
But, to be fair, they’ve only had about 10 years to iron out little cosmetic glitches like these.
(Now, I would like to explicitly, if parenthetically, emphasize that I’m not simply griping after the fact. Griping? Absolutely. But not after the fact. I did point out most of these shortcomings to the person in charge of the system this past summer when the system was not yet mandatory. The response, apparently, was to simply ignore my e-mail, and box the system pretty much as is through the University’s decision-making hierarchy.)
And then comes the kicker: the only thing paper-free in Not-Bielefeld in 2020 were the toilet-paper sections in most supermarkets during the height(s) of the coronavirus pandemic.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, German bureaucracy lives and dies with paper, with the corollary that trees live to die for German admin. I can click all the buttons I want, but, for it all to be valid in the end, I still have to print out the grades for each exam from the online system, duly sign each summary, and send each piece of paper to the examination office. Deja voodoo anyone?
A key, repeated word in the previous paragraph was “each”. We’re no longer talking about just a single piece of paper like in the good old days, but potentially many. For example, for a module with three exams, I now need to print out three pieces of paper and send them all in. Some really complex math using this example will hopefully highlight this subtlest of contradictions when it comes to the term “paper-free”. (Bear with me or hold tight. Your choice.)
Old, environmentally unfriendly system: one piece of paper.
New, paper-free system: three pieces of paper.
Net saving: minus two?
In other words, instead of printing out no pieces of paper whatsoever anymore in the new paper-free system (which, naively, is what one would expect from the name), I still have to print out at least one (breakeven) and possibly many more (breakdown). Which marketing genius (and simultaneous mathematical wanker) thought up this moniker?
In the end, paper-free exam administration really amounts to nothing more than getting the teaching staff to take on more of the work of the admin types. IT “solutions” very often are of more benefit to the admin types than the end users after all. You can understand it though. I certainly don’t like spending my time doing admin.
But then maybe that’s why I became a teacher (and former researcher) and left the admin to the admin types …
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