“The Laundry of Teaching” – that’s what a colleague of mine once nicknamed the process of grading because as soon as you finish one pile, another one awaits. Grading may not be the most riveting of the professorial tasks, but here are a few strategies to make it more accurate and less time-consuming.
- Give feedback using a speech-to-text dictation app or create an audio file of your verbal feedback using a mobile device and upload to Box for students.
- To reduce grading bias on paper exams, fold the corner of the page to hide student’s names.
- Only write exam questions that assess your course learning outcomes. The rest are likely unnecessary.
- Grade with a rubric for increased accuracy and consistency. This requires an investment of time up front to create the rubric but it will save you lots of time (and headaches) down the road.
Thanksgiving break has always been my time to catch up and get ready for the close of the semester. For most of us, that can only mean one thing–grading. I have used turn-it-in for years to avoid dragging hundreds of pages of paper with me everywhere and as a tool to encourage academic honesty. A few years ago I found myself typing the same comments over-and-over again “this sentence does not make any sense, try reading it out loud to yourself” or “this is great analysis, but it does not fit well with the rest of the paper” and so on. My fingers were getting tired and so was my brain.
As due dates for final papers and projects approach, how do we respond to students who ask us to review drafts before turning in the final product? We know that writing is a process, and that formative feedback is critical to student learning. Many of us build in intermediate due dates along the way—project proposals, annotated bibliographies, outlines, drafts, etc.—to help guide students to successful outcomes. The Good Teacher in me knows this, and is gratified when students embrace the iterative write-and-revise process. The Overworked Teacher in me sighs when yet another student email comes in asking, “Can you look this over before I turn it in?”