Abstract :
Once upon a time there was a young faculty member in electrical engineering who with two other faculty members had responsibility for teaching the introductory sophomore-level circuit analysis course to 500 students. In order to treat the students uniformly it was established that all students would take the same examinations. Feeling bold, this young assistant professor offered to grade the most difficult problem on the first hour test. Much to his chagrin this grading task required a full 20 hours. Much to my chagrin, this faculty member was I! Subsequently I was able to devise meaningful problems that could be more efficiently graded, but in no case was I able to reduce the grading time for a single problem to less than 10 hours (slightly more than one minute per problem per student).
