Excerpt from Grading Made Fast and Easy

This is an excerpt from Grading Made Fast and Easy: How to Streamline and Personalize Extensive Feedback

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“Grading Jail” refers to the long and frustrating hours spent grading papers. Grading takes more time than any other part of teaching. Teaching is the easy, fun, and rewarding element of education. Administrative chores are distasteful but usually not too time-consuming. Grading, however, is not only time-consuming, but also frustrating and stressful.

Grading discussions, essays, and other written work takes a lot of time without an effective system. Using the tools and strategies outlined in this short ebook, I’ve worked out a system that allows me to grade approximately fifty essays in about 5-6 hours and the same number of research papers in about 10-12 hours. This includes comprehensive feedback and personalized comments on every paper. Students always mention on course evaluations how much they appreciate my thorough suggestions, corrections, and comments on all their work. They like getting their assignments back so fast so they can use that feedback to better prepare for the next assignments.

Students want substantive feedback on their work and they want it fast. My usual practice is to return work within 24 hours of due dates. If I happen to have more than two classes with the same research paper due dates, then it might take me 48 hours. I like getting all the grading finished by the end of the first and second day of the week because that leaves me more time to interact with students in the discussions and individually via email or online text chat.

Writing comments on students' work takes time and reflection. It is so much easier to use the "bouta" method (bouta A, bouta B, and so forth). More faculty than you might imagine use this method of grading and do not bother to include comments on students’ work to explain grades. In one graduate course, the professor put a B on a twenty page case study with the following comment: “The content is good but you need to learn to use APA correctly.” That was it – nothing more.

Giving meaningful feedback to students about their work is a huge part of teaching and learning.  I am very nitpicky about writing and APA so I write a lot of comments throughout the paper about writing or using and citing sources properly. I also write questions here and there about content because students need to think more creatively and critically. They can figure out what works best without being told what to do. I always write a paragraph summarizing my reflections about the work.

"Canned" comments give instructors more time to personally interact with each student every week. Using copy/pasted comments on papers, as well as in discussions and answers to questions, means that there is more free time to provide individualized feedback to each individual.

Outstanding students need affirmation; failing students need encouragement and assistance; and average students need a little bit of both. Students, by and large, produce a certain "sameness" in their work class after class after class, from the outstanding work to the average work to the below passing work. After teaching a class for many semesters, instructors end up writing the same comments over and over on all levels of work. So it is smart to reuse those comments and then we have that much more time to engage in real and meaningful interaction with students who are at all levels of accomplishment.

Some schools prohibit instructors from using copy/pasted comments (good job, keep up the good work, etc.) and they are right to do so. However, there are other comments that are quite valuable and beneficial to both the students and the instructors. Yet it takes so long to write these on each paper, that many instructors don't even bother. I would rather provide students with "canned" and meaningful feedback than to not provide any comments at all. 

Schools that prohibit "copy/pasted comments" on students' work simply do not understand the process of evaluation, marking, and grading. The concept is not rocket science: If I write original comments on every assignment in every class, I would not have time for the personalized and "real" communication that I like to provide individual students in my classes.