Climbing the Grading Mountain: Tips and Tricks

The semester has hit crunch time, we have about three weeks left in the semester and students’ and professors alike are slammed with work. Students are turning in papers, projects, and presentations left and right, this means the grading is piling up. If you are anything like me, it can be overwhelming, and a daunting task to know where to begin and how to get it all done.
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When I was setting my strategy for end-of-the-semester grading, I thought about the things we tell our students to do to balance their coursework, jobs, and social time and realize that we should be telling ourselves the same things about grading. 

Break it up into small chunks
I am a list maker, so for me, it helps to break up my grading into small chunks, like “grade eight papers”, or, “grade the first two essay questions for X exam”. I then enter each chunk as separate tasks on my list. This helps me see grading as smaller tasks that can be tackled throughout the day, whenever I have the time. It also helps me feel like I’m making progress, I can cross some grading off the list when I’ve graded eight papers, rather than having to wait until I’ve graded all 24 of them. 

Rotate between tasks
We recommend to our students to rotate topics for studying because our attention for sustained tasks is limited. We should apply this to our grading too. Do one of your smaller chunks of grading for one class or assignment, then switch to another…especially when sitting down and grading for an extended period. This will hopefully prevent you from getting bored of a particular grading activity or topic; if you are anything like me, boredom might translate to grumpy. When I notice that I am getting grumpy in my grading, I know its time to switch so my grumpiness doesn’t turn into less favorable grading for the students. 

​Create a detailed rubric
This doesn’t work for every assignment or exam, but I find that I work most efficiently and fairest when I have a detailed rubric. For assignments, I create them in advance so students are more aware of the grading requirements; for exams that’s not always doable. But either way, I find it helpful to have a very clearly defined expectation for A, B, C, D, and F work. Rubrics are especially useful for online grading. With online grading, I can copy-paste rubrics into a comment box, and/or keep a running list of comments that can then be copy-pasted as needed to give feedback. 

​Schedule grading time
This is something new for me, especially when it comes to grading. This semester I took on my first online course during a standard semester, in the mix with my face-to-face classes. In order to ensure that I had sufficient time to grade/ prep/ interact with students, I carved out a minimum of three hours a week to do just that (equivalent to the time I spent in the classroom). I kept a consistent schedule of this time on my calendar just like each class meeting and my set office hours. ​​

This prevented meetings from being scheduled during those times and helps me be accountable. When you are in a grading crunch like these last few weeks of the semester, consider doing the same thing. If its on your calendar, you have reason to schedule other things around it. ​

Pause your inbox & silence your phone
I have recently learned about pausing your inbox. There are several apps and plug-ins, and even settings for your preferred email provider that allows you to “get” emails but keeps them out of your inbox until either a pre-determined time, or until you are done with your task. You could of course just close out of your email, but if you are like me and use Outlook’s calendar and task-view 

to get work done, that isn’t really an option. By pausing your inbox, you are eliminating the distraction a notification can provide. This is also true for silencing your phone. I am constantly getting notifications for tweets and emails on my phone. And most of the time, I’m fine with that. But when I am grading I find it useful to both silence my phone and turn it screen down, so I’m not distracted. ​
Research from 2015 supports the importance of doing so; researchers showed that “cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task.”

Ultimately, the grading needs to get done and ultimately we get it done, not matter how rough it is. I hope these tips and tricks help you conquer the next couple weeks. And, if you have any tried and true ideas, share them in the comments below....we can also use a little help from our friends to get us through!

Written by Ciara Kidder

For more ideas, check out Jen and Karly's ideas on climbing the grading mountain here.