Efficient Marking Practices: Written Assignments

Effi­cient Mark­ing Prac­tices: Writ­ten Assign­ments — PDF of this page

Mark­ing — pro­vid­ing grades/letters/values and feed­back on writ­ten assign­ments — is often time con­sum­ing and dis­liked by instruc­tors all over the world! Grad­ing excel­lent assign­ments can be affirm­ing and pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences, but it is time con­sum­ing when assign­ments are poor­ly writ­ten, with weak sen­tence and para­graph struc­tures, incor­rect mechan­ics and unclear expres­sion of ideas and con­cepts. If you have com­plex mark­ing tools or are unsure what and how much to mark, you can spend more time than you need to be engaged in the grad­ing process.

Mark­ing can eat up as much time as you want to give it, but the results may not be any bet­ter for the extra time you have spent. Pro­vid­ing feed­back on many writ­ten assign­ments can leave instruc­tors exhaust­ed and dis­cour­aged. New instruc­tors often fall into a grad­ing trap, where far too much of their time is spent mark­ing. They often think they are not doing their job with­out lots of mark­ing, or they want to ensure they can stand behind the mark if it is con­test­ed.

Or instruc­tors think that spend­ing long hours is a way to hon­our the work stu­dents put into their assign­ments or they want to pro­vide lots of feed­back to help them grow as writ­ers. Some­times after marked assign­ments have been returned, there may be some stu­dents want­i­ng either to con­test the grade, or under­stand why they got a par­tic­u­lar grade, which takes up even more of the instructor’s time. Schinske and Tan­ner’s essay (2017)  — Teach­ing More by Grad­ing Less (or Dif­fer­ent­ly) — points out that instruc­tors’ fear of grad­ing can often inhib­it them from try­ing new learn­ing activ­i­ties and being inno­v­a­tive in the class­room!

Stop the insan­i­ty! With some plan­ning, prepa­ra­tion, and sound prac­tices, mark­ing a writ­ten assign­ment can go smooth­ly and effi­cient­ly, pro­vide good learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for the stu­dents and good infor­ma­tion for the instruc­tor about the stu­dent learn­ing (or lack of) tak­ing place. Instruc­tors do not need to choose between super­fi­cial and min­i­mal grad­ing or a com­plex grad­ing sys­tem that leaves you exhaust­ed.  With the right strate­gies and tech­niques, you can give your stu­dents fre­quent and use­ful feed­back, while still main­tain­ing a healthy bal­ance between work and per­son­al life.

The fol­low­ing chart is a col­lec­tion of sug­ges­tions for being a more effi­cient edu­ca­tor when mark­ing or grad­ing (and giv­ing feed­back) on writ­ten assign­ments (research papers, essays, reports, reflec­tive pieces etc.) In the left col­umn are short state­ments about inef­fi­cient prac­tices and the right col­umn has sug­ges­tions for a more effi­cient way of grading/marking writ­ten papers.

Three rec­om­mend­ed com­pre­hen­sive resources and two essays on grad­ing effec­tive­ly with writ­ten assign­ments:

  • How to Grade Less, Grade Faster, and Be a Bet­ter Teacher of Writ­ing (Bates Col­lege — Maine) | Web­page
  • Respond­ing to Stu­dent Papers Effec­tive­ly and Effi­cient­ly (Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to — Ontario) | Web­page
  • Mark­ing Effi­cient­ly for Writ­ten Assign­ments (Uni­ver­si­ty of Alber­ta — Alber­ta) | YouTube Video
  • How to Grade Faster in 2020 (Deb­o­rah J. Cohan) | Inside High­er Ed Arti­cle
  • “How Did I Spend Two Hours Grad­ing this Paper?!” Respond­ing to Stu­dent Writ­ing with­out Los­ing Your Life (Eric LeMay, Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty) | Essays on Teach­ing Excel­lence POD Net­work
Assignment Design and Due Dates
Inefficient Practices
Efficient Practices
  1. Assign too many assign­ments with­in a course and also with­in a pro­gram area
 Start with your course learn­ing out­comes and align each out­come to one or two oppor­tu­ni­ties for stu­dents to demon­strate that out­come. If each learn­ing out­come has one or two stu­dent oppor­tu­ni­ties, then there is no need for more assign­ments or assess­ment.

Also look at all the assign­ments in each term/semester to deter­mine over­all work­load. Less is more. Few­er (expert­ly on-point and well-designed) assign­ments are bet­ter than many detailed assign­ments. Drop­ping assign­ments means less to grade and does­n’t mean the learn­ing expe­ri­ence is com­pro­mised.

  • Check out the Work­load Esti­ma­tor from Rice Uni­ver­si­ty: focus on the writ­ten assign­ments sec­tion to get a quick idea how much work you are assign­ing to stu­dents.
  1. Stu­dents have no exam­ples or exem­plars to know what is expect­ed of them
 Pro­vide stu­dents with an exam­ple of a high qual­i­ty, top marks exam­ple of the writ­ing assign­ment either with per­mis­sion from a stu­dent (name removed) or cre­ate a ‘fake’ exem­plar. Ask them to exam­ine the exem­plar as it relates to the cri­te­ria for the assign­ment and iden­ti­fy the char­ac­ter­is­tics that make it a good exam­ple. Do the same with a B‑level and a C‑level exem­plar. Involve groups of stu­dents dis­cussing which might be the bet­ter writ­ten assign­ment vs. the poor­er one. This helps stu­dents in so many ways to sub­mit a bet­ter writ­ten paper and there­fore less time to grade and pro­vide feed­back.
  1. Writ­ten assign­ment length is too long, detailed, and too much writ­ing expect­ed of stu­dents to demon­strate learn­ing out­come
 Short­en up the length of writ­ing required for sub­mis­sion and thus this will be less to read, review and eval­u­ate. Often short­er and more con­cise writ­ing assign­ments are more chal­leng­ing for stu­dents to do. Often short­er and more con­cise writ­ing assign­ments are more chal­leng­ing for stu­dents to do and can still pro­vide ade­quate evi­dence of stu­dent demon­stra­tion of learn­ing out­come.

The place to start with being more effi­cient is redesign and rethink your assign­ments. In fact, hav­ing tighter/shorter assign­ments that are focused on one or two key cri­te­ria — and are fast to assess — is more valu­able a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for stu­dents and could be less work for you.
  1. Focus too much on cita­tion for­mats (APA, MLA for­mat) punc­tu­a­tion and style
 Pick one assign­ment per term per pro­gram or one assign­ment per course that you may assess cita­tion for­mats in a more crit­i­cal way and focus on oth­er ele­ments of writ­ing the rest of the time. Or if in a mul­ti-year pro­gram focus on cita­tion for­mats lat­er in semesters/years and use the ear­li­er years/semesters to focus in on writ­ing for­mats, style, tone and expres­sion of ideas.
  1. No state­ment in your course out­line or first class about the pur­pose and plan for grad­ing, eval­u­at­ing and pro­vid­ing feed­back
 Put a state­ment in your course out­line and share with stu­dents the pur­pose and plan for pro­vid­ing feed­back to them on their writ­ten assign­ments. Specif­i­cal­ly, whether you are going to focus more on feed­back than grades and give them X amount of time etc.
  1. Val­ue of writ­ten assign­ment is not clear­ly out­lined and may not be aligned with learn­ing out­comes
 Often writ­ten assign­ments have been in a course for years or have not been chal­lenged in terms of removal or edit­ing. These assign­ments may not be seen of val­ue to the learn­ers or the instruc­tors — and may not align with course learn­ing out­comes. Any attempt at grad­ing or mark­ing the work is fraught with frus­tra­tion because nei­ther stu­dent nor instruc­tor val­ues the assign­ment. Ditch the assign­ment. There is no expec­ta­tion on the NIC ACDs that you need to keep an assign­ment from year to year.
  1. All com­ments, feed­back and mark­ing comes from the instruc­tor all the time
 Build metacog­ni­tive and reflec­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties for stu­dents to pro­vide their own self-assess­ment to a writ­ten assign­ment, sub­mit­ting at same time as assign­ment etc. This will put the onus on them to self-assess against the cri­te­ria pro­vide insight­ful com­ments and assess­ments that you can home in when grad­ing their papers. AND/OR allow for peers to pro­vide feed­back on draft ver­sions or the final ver­sion before it is sub­mit­ted via learn­ing how to give help­ful feed­back align­ing with exem­plars etc.
  1. No draft ver­sion oppor­tu­ni­ty for peer or brief instruc­tor review
 Include a draft ver­sion in your process for either peer (stu­dents in the class pro­vid­ing feed­back to each oth­er based on cri­te­ria) or instruc­tor feed­back to address key top­ics or areas. This allows the stu­dent to have some input on mak­ing their final ver­sion more robust and like­ly with less issues. Research Arti­cle Sum­ma­ry of Find­ings

The assess­ment con­sist­ed of sub­mit­ting a draft course­work essay, which was dis­cussed and eval­u­at­ed face-to-face with the course teacher before a self-reflec­tive piece was writ­ten about the assess­ment process and a final essay was sub­mit­ted for sum­ma­tive grad­ing. We evi­dence that this process assert­ed a pos­i­tive influ­ence on the stu­dent learn­ing expe­ri­ence in a num­ber of inter-relat­ed cog­ni­tive and affec­tive ways, impact­ing pos­i­tive­ly upon learn­ing behav­iour, sup­port­ing stu­dent achieve­ment and rais­ing stu­dent sat­is­fac­tion with feed­back.

  1. Sub­mis­sion late in the term so no oppor­tu­ni­ty to have feed­back to improve work with­in course
 Make writ­ing assign­ments with your feed­back due ear­li­er in the term so stu­dents can take that feed­back and apply it. Any writ­ing assign­ments due lat­er in the term do not get feed­back or inten­sive mark­ing on them. Not worth your time to com­ment when stu­dents can’t apply your feed­back with­in the next few weeks.
Marking Plans, Schemes, Tools, and Practices
Inefficient Practices
Efficient Practices
  1. Write comments/feedback on ALL pages of the writ­ten assign­ment
 Read the whole writ­ten assign­ment but cor­rect and line edit only a few para­graphs or pages. Leave the rest unmarked. Add a final com­ment. You can also do ‘min­i­mal mark­ing’ by just putting a mark or sym­bol in front of all the sen­tences that need cor­rect­ing and ask the stu­dents to fol­low up with cor­rec­tions as part of the grade or just an expec­ta­tion of pass­ing the course. Cor­rect­ing every gram­mar, con­tent and writ­ten error is YOU doing the work of the stu­dent!
  1. Return work a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time after the stu­dents have sub­mit­ted the writ­ten assign­ment
 If you are return­ing work to stu­dents two weeks or more then you have not been effi­cient with your time in giv­ing feed­back as that will mean less now to stu­dents so far removed from when they sub­mit­ted the assign­ment. The soon­er you can get things back to stu­dents with con­cise and direct feed­back, the more effec­tive it will be for them to improve their work and learn from your feed­back.
  1. Start with one assign­ment and mark­ing one after anoth­er
 Try skimming/reading ALL the writ­ten assign­ments first. Put into three piles (dig­i­tal­ly this can be done by mak­ing a list and writ­ing stu­dent names in one of three sec­tions) — Very good/excellent (A), Good/Satisfactory (B/C) and Poor (C-/D). This is called holis­tic read­ing and it can often save a lot of time in know­ing what you are going to be mark­ing and how the whole class has done.
  1. Marking/grading takes hours per each assign­ment
 Set a time lim­it of X min­utes to grade a paper (e.g., 15 — 20 min­utes) and do as much as you can in that time and then stop and grade anoth­er paper. Giv­ing a set amount of time helps you man­age the work­load in mark­ing and ensures each stu­dent gets a fair amount of your time to com­ment and grade. Ensure your grad­ing tools can be quick­ly accessed and sup­port stu­dent learn­ing.
  1. Use com­plex and detailed rubrics for mark­ing writ­ten assign­ments
 Use a sin­gle-point (one col­umn) rubric or a check­list. Arti­cle | Details   Rubrics do not always save time and with the vague­ness of qualifiers/descriptors per each cat­e­go­ry it becomes chal­leng­ing to make an objec­tive deci­sion. Rubrics with many rows/categories of cri­te­ria just take a long time to go through. Focus on a cou­ple of key ele­ments to eval­u­ate and ditch the com­plex rubrics.
  1. Adjust mark­ing scheme to be the same as the weight­ed per­cent­age mark
 DO NOT inflate or deflate your scor­ing schemes to align with the weight­ed total for the whole course. You are mak­ing more work for your­self either tak­ing a scor­ing scheme up or down and cre­at­ing errors in the way you are rep­re­sent­ing stu­dent learn­ing. Use Bright­space assign­ments with the total points you need to score and grade the writ­ten work and then let the grade item in Grades do the con­ver­sion for you!
  1. Grade know­ing the stu­den­t’s name
 Try grad­ing anony­mous­ly. You might save some time in not going into spe­cif­ic detail with one stu­dent or anoth­er. This injects a good dose of reduc­ing some bias, but it can also save time as you are focus­ing more on the writ­ten assign­ment and not the stu­dent.
  1. Mark all assign­ments after com­mon due date
 Con­sid­er stag­ger­ing the due date for var­i­ous groups of stu­dents so that you are not mark­ing all at the same time and get more effi­cient with mark­ing in batch­es over a few weeks. This ‘chunk­ing’ prac­tice also means you have fresh­er eyes for stu­dent work. This helps pre­vent the ‘laun­dry issue” where ungrad­ed papers pile up like dirty laun­dry when neglect­ed.
  1. Detailed or out of date mark­ing schemes that are adding to work­load
 If you have a mark­ing scheme that takes time — try revis­ing it. Check­lists are quick and fast ways to give feed­back and mark a writ­ten assign­ment. Sin­gle point rubrics with a few items to look at can give you a quick rat­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty with the abil­i­ty to add a + or — if the work was above or below the required expec­ta­tions.
  1. Pro­vide only indi­vid­ual feed­back to stu­dents
 Con­sid­er writ­ing a class sum­ma­ry of all the com­mon errors along with where out­stand­ing work was done. This will pre­vent you from writ­ing the same com­ment every time on each assign­ment. Saves time!
  1. Stu­dents email sub­mis­sions or instruc­tor down­loads dig­i­tal doc­u­ments from a LMS
 Using the assign­ments tool in Bright­space can speed up your time by more eas­i­ly man­ag­ing who has sub­mit­ted and who has­n’t. If you spec­i­fy you can have stu­dents sub­mit doc­u­ment for­mats (e.g., PDF) that are read­able with­in Bright­space and then you can use a sim­ple rubric or your own mark­ing scheme to grade and sub­mit feed­back back to stu­dents. And you can also use the audio/video to share short feed­back dig­i­tal­ly — sav­ing oodles of time!
Feedback Content, Focus and Practices
Inefficient Practices
Efficient Practices
  1.  Repeat­ed­ly com­ment on per­sis­tent issues or errors
 One and Done! If you see repeats of errors just men­tion once and put a nota­tion beside oth­er sim­i­lar errors to indi­cate the same error. Don’t keep wast­ing your time com­ment­ing on the same error!
  1. Com­ment on all the prob­lem areas
 Select one to three key prob­lem areas in a stu­den­t’s writ­ten assign­ment and ONLY com­ment on those. Not all the areas. This will help you cut down on time but also focus the stu­dents on key areas that they need to improve upon.
  1. Feed­back from pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions of assign­ment is not avail­able or shared
 If there is a writ­ten assign­ment you typ­i­cal­ly give each year, why not share some com­mon chal­lenges and areas of suc­cess stu­dents typ­i­cal­ly have with the assign­ment. You might share group feed­back sug­ges­tions you gave in pre­vi­ous year or share sam­ples of stu­dent work with per­mis­sion.
  1. Weak­er writ­ing assign­ments require more mark up and feed­back
 DO NOT fall into the trap of tak­ing longer to grade weak­er assign­ments. Just do the first few pages and then put a com­ment on there to tell stu­dents to come and see you.
  1. Pro­vide only writ­ten feed­back to stu­dents
 Con­sid­er pro­vid­ing audio feed­back (either through Bright­space or on your own record­ing device or Kaltura) to give stu­dents feed­back on a writ­ten paper — either by itself or to sup­ple­ment min­i­mal writ­ten feed­back. Audio feed­back is faster to give and more mean­ing­ful for stu­dents than writ­ten. They are more like­ly to lis­ten and learn from audio feed­back than writ­ten feed­back. Research Paper Find­ings
  • Audio feed­back was per­ceived to be more effec­tive than text-based feed­back for con­vey­ing nuance
  • Audio feed­back was asso­ci­at­ed with feel­ings of increased involve­ment and enhanced learn­ing com­mu­ni­ty
    inter­ac­tions
  • Audio feed­back was asso­ci­at­ed with increased reten­tion of con­tent
  • Audio feed­back was asso­ci­at­ed with the per­cep­tion that the instruc­tor cared more about the stu­dent.
  • Doc­u­ment analy­sis revealed that stu­dents were three times more like­ly to apply con­tent for which audio com­ment­ing was pro­vid­ed in class projects than was the case for con­tent for which text based com­ment­ing was pro­vid­ed.
  • Audio com­ment­ing was also found to sig­nif­i­cant­ly increase the lev­el at which stu­dents applied such con­tent
  1. Use unique and cus­tomized feed­back com­ments to stu­dents
 Cre­ate a com­ment bank! Put your most fre­quent­ly used com­ments in a Word or Excel doc­u­ment and copy and paste!
  1. Pro­vide a grade with the feed­back
 Any­time you pro­vide a grade/letter/number/total score with feed­back you spend time on some­thing that deters stu­dents from access­ing your writ­ten or audio feed­back. Try delay­ing a grade or score on a paper or move to a more holis­tic assess­ment method that asks stu­dents to weigh in on their grades via exem­plars, clear guide­lines around what makes for a good writ­ing exam­ple in X year or Y course.
  1. Com­ments are long or take a long time to write
 Reduce your com­ment word­ing. Try learn­ing to write short­er phras­es like “Needs devel­op­ment,” “Needs a clear focus,” “‘Needs a ‘so what,’” or “Lacks required sources.” This strat­e­gy has the added bonus of adding a lev­el of con­sis­ten­cy to your grad­ing. You may also have short­cut terms or phras­es you can give to stu­dents in a leg­end. OR just say “see me briefly” and set up a quick meet­ing to go over some­thing that would have tak­en you much too long to write.
  1. Spend time doing math
 DO NOT do the math and spend time with con­ver­sions, cal­cu­la­tors or ways of fig­ur­ing out what a score will be con­vert­ed to a per­cent­age or to a weight­ed amount of the final grade. Put your work into Bright­space grades and let the com­put­er (and grades set up) do the work for you!
  1. Com­ments not with any order or struc­ture
 Try stick­ing to these com­po­nents when you com­ment on stu­dent work and keep feed­back short and focused! Keep the lan­guage aca­d­e­m­ic in nature yet acces­si­ble to stu­dents.
  • Focus on high­er-order con­cepts and those that are aligned with the learn­ing out­comes of the course.
  • Always begin with a pos­i­tive state­ment.
  • Orga­nize your com­ments so that there is pur­pose in what you are say­ing and not scat­tered feed­back.
  • Be spe­cif­ic by giv­ing an exam­ple or point­ing direct­ly to some­thing writ­ten.
  • Rein­force the pos­i­tive any­time you see good work.
  • Out­line the areas not done well and share why or point to a com­mon list of com­ments with solu­tions.
  • Give rec­om­men­da­tions for improve­ment.
  • Avoid over-com­ment­ing. Do not repeat the same feed­back over and over.
  • Make your com­ments as leg­i­ble and straight­for­ward as pos­si­ble.
  • End com­ment should sum­ma­rize your assess­ment of the strengths and weak­ness­es of the writ­ten assign­ment.

Cred­its for ideas, infor­ma­tion and resources