Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to sit down and interview several exam graders from Harvard and Columbia. For the next five days I'll be relating some of the strategies that came out in the interviews for doing well on exams.
#1 Make it nice:
“I’m human, I usually save most of the grading for the last night. By the third hour or so I’m usually seeing double from reading so many handwritten scribbles.” –Julie
For two identical responses-- if there is any bias on behalf of the reader--the one that appears cleaner and neater is going to get the better grade. It’s human nature to favor the more aesthetically pleasing responses, so make sure yours is neat. Try to write as neatly as possible given the time constraints. For those of us (like myself) who were not blessed with neat handwriting, there are other things which can have a big effect on presentation: skip every other line in your response, keep wide margins and use pen. Also, when crossing out words, a single stroke through the line will suffice: “your misspelled words are not national secrets; you don’t have to completely annihilate your mistakes with so much pen that it bleeds through to the other side.”
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