Whitman from Watertown With a Game Tip.

Last night I had yet another night of grading misery until about 1:00 AM, not because I was finished, but because I could not stand to see one more blasted moronic paper. They can't even plagiarize anything well. My husband, a refugee from academe who quit for a steady job where he was not embarrassed to tell people his rate of pay or work, was still reading online. He wanted to show me a link for an iOS game I would enjoy: The Grading Game.

Next thing I know, it's 4:00 AM, and I've been playing a game where I grade papers. The object of the game is to fail a student ever more miserably. It's a dumb casual game with a difficult time limit, a fair amount of repetition, so not exactly going to break any popularity records, but I'm hooked. The scenario is that the player is a TA for a professor who will reward his TA for failing students. At the start of each session, the player is presented with a brief grammar rant, student picture and student tweet -- like "How does he get paid $50,000 a year!" or "He played Gameboy all during the final". Then the screen shows a bad student paper on some inane topic with misspellings and bad grammar. Student grades above a C are TA failures, and the professor responds with glee to each failure (my favorite was when he laughs and dances a jig over a negative score). The greater the failure, the better the TA reward.

The game is ostensibly meant to teach grammar, and surely no one enjoys revenge on students who complain and whine!

I'm hoping for a new high score tonight.