Where's The Voting?

So, no vote for comment of the week this week, as if anyone actually voted here for comment of the week anyway. So what's going on?

I should lay some foundation first. Students in a couple of classes each semester are required to follow the greenpage and to make sure they are following they have to do five comments per week on the blog. Each time a student leaves a comment (well really when anyone leaves a comment) I get an email and then a filter routine in my email apps sticks the emails into a "News Comment" folder.

Through the week when I see that someone has posted something I will read the entry and if I think the work is a candidate for comment of the week I flag it. I tried once upon a time to read all the comments at once at the end of the week but it was just too much of a slog. By the end of the week I usually have flagged something like 12-15 entries. I then need to cull the field down to the top five I put out for voting.

The culling process starts while I do the weekly comment count. I sort the comment folder by sender and check each entry for appropriate depth and look for duplicates. When doing that I will see if one student has multiple flagged messages. When there is a case of multiple good entries from a single student I usually do a quick assessment of which of those multiples I will put forward for the comment of the week. At some point I decided that each of those five comments should be from different students.

Usually. This week there was an artifact.

This week while I was culling from 15 to 5 I found that one student had actually flagged 5 out of 5 comments in the week. There had been times before when people had had three. I think there may even have been a case where someone had four in a week. But never five, until this week. So this week I made a new rule:

If you flag five out of five comments in a given week you win.

So no vote this week. One student just did too well. Damn. I'll keep this rule in place until two students flag 5 out of 5 in a single week together. And then I'll think of another rule (while being quietly thrilled with the problem). I can't wait.