By Dino Sossi (updated February 15, 2020)
https://dinosossi.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/to-read-or-not-to-read-tldr-grading-graphic/
Professor Michael Millner revealed something startling about his teaching (2018).
He stopped writing comments on student essays.
Why resort to something so radical, something seemingly so anti-educational?
Millner found that one too many students had just looked at their grades and stuffed their essays hastily into their knapsacks. The comments were irrelevant.
Why bother?
He also found that providing too much feedback overwhelmed some students. If you are learner with a part-time job, family responsibilities, and personal life to attend to, how much time can you spend on reading professor feedback.
Yet another chore to attend to.
Millner eventually settled on a new method of feedback.
One-on-one conferences.
Students would visit during office hours and together they would have frank conversations about their work.
He admitted that this was not a particularly novel, or even revolutionary, move. Other professors also host conferences. Millner found it opened up a more positive, constructive, and generative ways to comment on student work.
But some educators may be thinking, what if you have a huge class?
Similarly, what if you do not have the time, ability, or resources to meet one-on-one with students?
There are no simple singular answers.
~
And all of this has become more complicated due to the requisite rigors of student work, such as reading lengthy student papers.
One question that arises from this is the ideal essay length. How long should an assigned essay be?
Some educators have prescribed word limits for academic essays. One educator suggests 1,500 to 5,000 words for an undergraduate essay and 2,500 to 6,000 for graduate essays (McCombes, 2019). This shows the different levels of required for learning and writing. More mature students, more demanding standards.
Due to the increasing number of students and corresponding number of pieces of written work, a variety of educators have a range of suggestions to cope with the subsequent increase in grading demands. To help improve understanding, they are divided into multiple sections:
Rubrics and Grading Suggestions:
- Use high quality rubrics (Cohan, 2020; EasyBib, 2019; Kearney, 2019; Recine, 2019). They allow educators to provide standardized feedback more efficiently.
- Assign numeric grades to student work (Cohan, 2020). Numbers can be transformed in multiple ways. For example, you can use simple Excel functions to convert numbers into letter grades.
- On a related note, ensure your grades are divisible by 10 (e.g., 10, 20) (Recine, 2019). This will ensure that your grades are easier for students to understand as opposed to more atypical sums (e.g., assignments graded out of 17 or 23, etc.). Also, it will allow you to more quickly convert your marks to letter grades.
- Similar to above, divide your rubrics into increments of 10 (Recine, 2019). This will allow you to build on already existing grading scales (e.g., A = 90-100%, B = 80-89%, C = 70-79%, etc). Providing grade ranges that adhere to existing institutional grading schemes can only make your life easier and less complicated for everyone involved – professors and students alike.
Providing Feedback/Comments:
- Do not repeat yourself when fixing student mistakes (Eidinger, 2016). In short, fix an error once, mention that similar ones follow. Vigilant learners can follow your directions to identify other instances of errors and correct them on their own. Less vigilant ones can read your single suggestion and move on.
- Do not copyedit an entire paper (Finley, n.d.). Students can easily become overwhelmed by excessive feedback. Pick-and-choose what you think is most important that can be improved.
- Provide collective feedback (EasyBib, 2019). As you grade, note various themes that emerge from individual essays. After you have completed your work, disseminate all of this feedback across all of your students as opposed to just giving comments to individuals. You could also discuss these points in class after all student essays have been graded and returned to reinforce learning.
Group Work:
- Peer edit papers (EasyBib, 2019). Supplement peer editing with rubrics, criteria, or guided questions. This will help students think more deeply about what they should include in their work. This should also result in more polished submissions. An additional benefit? Students begin to think like graders and see their work from a third-party perspective.
- Assign group essays for collaborative writing (Bible, n.d.). From this, students can learn to critique and edit one another’s work, hopefully in a mutually beneficial manner.
Miscellaneous Considerations:
- Limit assignment length (Kruse, n.d.; Recine, 2019). Short essays can be just as rigorous and demanding as longer ones. And due to these limits, these shorter pieces of writing also put a premium on editing; it takes effort to whittle down long essays into concise ones. Also, this will allow students to begin transitioning to professional demands. Who wants to read sprawling, novel-length, emails at work? (Editor’s note: I am guilty as charged!)
- Allow students to select just a portion of their work that they want to be graded (Kruse, n.d.). This can highlight work that they are especially proud of.
- Build to a final essay over time (EasyBib, 2019). Having multiple stages (e.g., thesis statement, research question, introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion) should make grading final work easier. Instead of grading a long rough draft at the end of the semester, work toward a more higher quality one consisting of refined smaller elements over time. The final essay becomes a kind of beautiful mosaic of polished pebbles.
- Ask for electronic submissions (EasyBib, 2019). This will allow you to more easily convert data between different digital formats. Also, typed essays can be much easier to read than handwritten ones (EasyBib, 2019). Just say no to rushed chicken scratch.
- Provide students a choice of essay topics (EasyBib, 2019). Although this will most likely not make your work go any faster, having a variety of essays to read may break up your feelings of monotony (EasyBib, 2019).
- Grade when you feel fresh and energetic (Cohan, 2020). Sleepiness leads to sloppiness. Revisiting grading that was completed when you were too tired may waste a lot of your time later on.
- Limit distractions (Kruse, n.d.). In the digital era, time wasters are literally at our finger tips around the clock. Sorry YouTube videos. Facebook timeline. Instagram feeds. And, of course, reading blog posts on grading…
Go grade!
And enjoy the work! Your students will appreciate it (although maybe grudgingly at first…)!
P.S. In this era of big data, efficiency rules. Please ensure that providing your students high quality feedback is your ultimate goal. Of course, without going batty from marking hundreds of essays…
References:
Bible, A. (n.d.). 5 essay grading tips for grading essays faster and more efficiently. Save time grading essays online or in print. Building Book Love. https://buildingbooklove.com/5-essay-grading-tips-for-grading-essays/
Cohan, D. J. (2020, February 11). How to grade faster in 2020. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/02/11/advice-grading-more-efficiently-opinion
EasyBib. (2019, April 10). 6 ways to save time grading essays. EasyBib. https://www.easybib.com/guides/6-ways-to-save-time-grading-essays/
Eidinger, A. (2016, April 12). 10 tips for grading essays quickly and efficiently. Unwritten Histories. https://www.unwrittenhistories.com/10-tips-for-grading-essays-quickly-and-efficiently/
Finley, T. (n.d.). 12 smart ideas to grade essays faster. Teach Thought. https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/12-ways-to-shorten-essay-grading-time/
Kearney, V. (2019, September 3). 6 ways to grade college essays faster and easier. Owlcation. https://owlcation.com/academia/Grade-Sheet-for-Freshman-English-Essays
Kruse, M. (n.d.). Practical tips for grading faster: Keep the quality & maintain your sanity. Reading and Writing Haven. https://www.readingandwritinghaven.com/practicaltipstogradewritingfaster/
Recine, D. (2019, January 22). How to grade papers faster. Magoosh. https://schools.magoosh.com/schools-blog/how-to-grade-papers-faster
McCombes, S. (2019, January 28). How long is an essay? Scribbr. https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/length/
Millner, M. (2018, February 12). Why I stopped writing on my students’ papers. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-i-stopped-writing-on-my-students-papers/
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