I am bad at grading.
Well, I am. I’ve never been very good at it, actually. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I don’t necessarily “believe” in grades. I believe in them enough that I really wanted to get A’s in high school and college, but I also always recognized the fact that they really are arbitrary measures of success, and the students that got the best grades were often the students who learned what the teacher wanted and produced it. In short, the students with the highest GPAs either learned how to “play the game” or cheated. Maybe it’s also because, since I started teaching, I’ve taught classes in which I need to grade mostly on whether or not the student completed the assignment and followed the directions. If the student was able to do this, I usually gave that student at least a B, because there were so many students who didn’t read the directions or didn’t listen in class and therefore produced an assignment that wasn’t actually the assignment. I did, however, reserve the A for those students who not only followed directions but went above and beyond. Maybe it’s because I know that my students don’t usually read my extensive comments on their assignments, and therefore I find it tedious to even write them. I much prefer to give the students a grade and then hold a one-on-one conference with them afterward to discuss why they received the grade.
Regardless of the reason (and I’m sure it’s all of the above), I’ve never been very good at grading. There was one time I felt I had some success with grading essays: Last year, my students wrote their major research papers, and I graded them with a rubric, along with writing them a letter about what they did well and what they could improve for next time. That, I felt was successful, because the students actually read the letters and seemed to genuinely appreciate them. However, it took so much time to write the letters, and there isn’t another research paper in the curriculum that year, so I wonder if it really was worth it.
Staring at the stack of grading in front of me right now, this seems to be something that must be remedied soon. I do tend to avoid grading right away because of all of these reasons, and it always ends up being a lose-lose situation. The students don’t receive feedback instantly, and I end up with a pile of grading because I can’t simply stop collecting work because I have other things to grade in my possession already.
I’ve thought maybe having rubrics might help because they standardize the grading process and also help avoid writing the same exact thing on each student’s paper. But rubrics don’t generally take into account the different situations each student might be experiencing or the different backgrounds that each student has.
I guess I’m just not sure how to deal with The Grading Situation. How do you deal with grading? I could use some help!
Ah, the bane of teaching. I handle the grading load by having relatively clear goals for assignments, linking assignments, and providing students with grade descriptions. I haven’t figured out how to use rubrics properly, so I just have sheets that say generally what an A paper will do/contain/say, what a B paper will do, and so on. I handwrite in-line comments and type end comments — that way I can copy and paste some language/explanations for different students as necessary. Typing end comments also allows me to keep a copy of my comments, something that would be impossible with all handwritten comments.
I structure my courses so that projects/assignments build on each other in terms of skill development; that way, almost all of my comments give students a way to move forward into the next project. You might want to revisit the order of units/projects in your class to see how well they do build on each other. I bet they already do, though, so it’s just a matter of identifying skills or themes that students can take from one project to the next. In my lower-level comp class, for example, we start with summaries where we spend a lot of time on author tags. This is a theme because we work with outside texts throughout the class, and the author tag discussion easily turns into a citation discussion. You can also comment on what students can improve on the next time they write a research paper — it’s likely not the last research paper they’ll ever write.
To encourage students to read and apply my comments to their writing in meaningful ways, I allow revisions (with revision-reflections) and I have also had them reflect on their feedback after workshop and when I’ve handed back graded essays.
I also don’t think that every piece of writing needs feedback. I have my students do a lot of collaborative/conversational forum posts that are graded for completion, and there are some projects (topic proposals, for example) that don’t require a ton of response. In that way, thinking about your goals for the assignment can also help you gauge whether you need to comment or not and how much to comment.
You probably already do a lot of this, so I’ll end with this: Grading is just time-consuming and it is sometimes not very fun. I feel ya.