grading the night away

I am grading, grading, and grading. One of the most annoying things is that a. Prof decided to give students 6 questions of which they have to answer 5, they can pick which one to drop. This means I have to be capable of grading 6 questions, thus reading more and think more about the test than if he simply decided to give 5 and make me grade 5. b. students forget that a Person has to read the stuff they wrote down. Writing in hieroglyphs does NOT help. Nor writing a page full of text and when the page is sort of full, it does not help your case when you start writing text on the edges of the page, circling around what you already have written. Stop that. Either change your handwriting to a smaller font: there are these persons (mostly girls) who only get 5 words on a line due to all the wide O E and A font they write in. Cute, but does not come in handy when there is a page limitation. Or decide to answer ONLY the question. Plus, when asked to calculate the difference between 15 and 10 and explain how, do not include the history of earth, the topic the test is on and what you ate last evening. Also, when asked how something is named, writing down: [LITERALLY!!!!] "it is on the tip of my tongue, and I think it rhymes with analogy" when the word to be named is 'moon' does NOT help. This is a test, you are at Uni, this is not a knotting exam at boy-scouts (and even there I think when you are asked to make a certain knot, the knot has to be exactly like asked). What have I learned from this: 1. I will be more concise in my article writing 2. I will try to avoid words like thingy, you know, etc. when conversing with any other well-brained person when I speak of my project. 3. Grading is a bitch. I have now spent 3 days, and it apparently takes me a day per question 4. I should be less meticulous when grading, I make this schemes with the grades broken down to decimals. I should be less neat, simply trust my gut more (or so the more experienced graders say) 5. I fear the pile of written reports I have to grade this week (50 on topic A + 50 article-like manuscripts...)