Kuala Lampur, Feb. 11 -- It is exam season again.

You can feel it on campus before you see it. The slightly heavier silence in corridors and hallways. The way students walk faster, eyes lowered, shoulders tense. Lecturers move differently too. Less small talk. More emails. More deadlines stacked on top of each other. Everyone is tired, just in different ways.

People often assume exam season is stressful mainly for students. It is. But it is also stressful for lecturers, although for reasons that are rarely spoken about. It is not just the volume of marking, although that alone can be overwhelming. A friend of mine is handling close to four hundred students this semester, with exam scripts arriving only days before final submission deadl...