Marking Sucks.

Just sayin'.

Remind me to refrain from applying to be a marker* ever again. The headache is not worth the money - it's not fun to try and think like other people.

(I am a extraordinarily slow marker - it takes me one hour to go through one question for a class of 30. But it's also very conscientious marking, and I try to catch everything.)

*As opposed to TA-ing, where although there's marking, there's also some - possibly interesting/useful - interaction.

[Edited 1]
I will probably update this post as the night goes on and I get increasingly pissed off about marking. For example, someone just needlessly expressed a polynomial in summation form in order to prove something true for all integrals (polynomial or not). Oh nooooo. (It's not wrong, it's just really annoying.)

[Edited 2]
The usual way to get a orthonormal basis (more generally, orthonormal linearly independent vectors) from a plain old basis is by Gram-Schmidt. But: Gram-Schmidt only works for finite sets, because the process must terminate! On the other hand, induction or recursive definitions based on Gram-Schmidt might give the desired infinite set.

[Edited 3]
People keep giving me dicey proofs on why the usual inner product on two continuous functions is an inner product. (All the proofs I've seen so far requires the function to be "nice" - which in the problem's case it is - but none of the proofs ever mentioned that! "Nice" meaning "nothing weird, like point discontinuities")

[Edited 4]
You'd have thought that people have learnt how to write legibly by now. *Cross-eyed*

[Edited 5]
Either the professor's messing with me, or every student's a physicist. Linearity of the inner product in the first variable, please!

[Edited 6]
Don't put "+ C" in definite integrals. Just don't do it. And especially don't subtract them off afterwards. (The + C's are arbitrary!)

[Edited 7]
Couple of days later, 3:30 a.m., still marking. Argh. People write so much, half of which is wrong!