How to Make Grading Essays Easier?

Grading essays is one of the most time-consuming things school-teachers have to do. A single essay may require care and attention, as well as consistency and a deep understanding of content. The more essays a teacher has to grade, the more likely they are to burn out. There are ways to ensure the process goes smoothly, by being systematic and efficient. To make grading essays easier, consider using a reliable write my essay service to help with structuring and formatting. Academized.com offers such services, providing well-organized essays that can simplify the grading process. Teachers can approach grading in such a way that it becomes less stressful, and more effective in providing students with feedback on their writing.

The Purpose of Grading

It’s worth taking a step back before you start grading essays to think about what grading essays is for – the purpose behind this assignment. Grading essays has several purposes: it can be a way to see what students have learned, it can generate feedback for students which can help them improve their work, and it can help teachers guide their instruction in the future. Thinking about the purposes of grading helps teachers engage in grading more deliberately. Knowing up front what you’re trying to achieve can help orient you towards that target.

Establishing Clear Criteria

One of the best ways to make grading essays easier is to define what you will grade before your students begin to write. It’s easier to rate work against a rubric or a clear set of guidelines than it is to subjectively decide whether a paper is good. It’s also easier to grade when your students know what you expect. When students know what they’re aiming for, and can interpret what you want, they are much more likely to write appropriately to meet those standards, making it easier for you to grade.

Developing a Grading Rubric

One way you can do this is to create a grading rubric, using a top essay writing service can help by providing clear and well-structured submissions. A rubric breaks an essay into a series of components – thesis statement, organization, evidence, grammar, etc – and then assigns each component a specific weight in the final judgment. For instance, if organization is considered to be the most important component of an essay, it might represent 40 per cent of the final grade, with grammar a distant second at 25 per cent. But even if individual sentences are poorly constructed or full of spelling mistakes, a rubric enables a teacher to swiftly and efficiently check off each component as it appears. By treating each essay this way, you can save tremendous amounts of time when grading and add a level of consistency that might otherwise be lacking.

Pre-Grading Strategies

Before you even sit down to grade a single paper, pre-grading strategies can still leave you prepared for the task ahead. Here’s a tactic I’ve often used: scan all of your students’ essays before you sit down to grade. Get a feel for the quality of the papers; what trends do you notice? Were students generally strong on thesis development and introductions, but weak on support and development of ideas? Identify key issues to watch for in detail. After pre-grading, determine which essays might need extra feedback, clarification or concern.

Streamlining Feedback

Some teachers divide their comments into different areas of feedback – for example, giving one comment on voice and one on sentence structure. But good comments include specifics, which can take time. If you want to provide more feedback than can reasonably fit on an essay, try combining standard and personalized comments: select a few common mistakes that you can write up in advance as comments, such as ‘This essay needs to be longer; your original thesis needs to be better fleshed out’, or: ‘There are some problems with the mechanics; you need to check your grammar for mistakes.’ For the ideas that are unique to that student, pick one or two areas where he or she could improve and focus on those. Remember, you don’t have to tell the

Encouraging Peer Review

A second strategy for reducing grading workload, but students also gain more clarity on the standards A peer review session allows own drafts prior to submitting them for a grade, likely improving the making grading less labor

Utilizing Technology

Technology, as well as offering some more capable forms of automated grading (eg, of grammar and syntax within an essay), usually offers teachers much more efficient ways to give feedback to students, via a digital platform, for instance, which can offer comment banks and even voice-to-text technologies. In conclusion, digital technology can certainly take much of the tedium out of grading, without requiring an impoverished form of feedback

Setting Realistic Expectations

Essays can be overwhelming. When a stack of papers sits waiting to be graded, it’s easy to feel daunted. So when you sit down to begin, tame those monsters by calibrating how long you intend to spend on each. Setting a reasonable cap before you start the task can build in breaks. Give yourself the freedom to focus on the most important things and skip over points such as sentence structure and grammar. A time cap can help you pace yourself, despite a desire to speed through each one.

Managing Grading Load

Depending on the number of essays you have to grade, staying on top of them can be daunting. A good strategy is to spread out the grading over a number of days or weeks. For example, rather than trying to grade all of them in one sitting, teachers can grade batches of essays over several days. This can be very helpful, both for avoiding burnout and for making sure that you can sustain your focus on each essay. A second option is to spread out the grading task even more, by focusing on smaller chunks of each essay instead. For example, you could grade all of the introductions one day and all of the conclusions the next.

Maintaining Consistency

Grading for consistency is essential, yet it is hard to continue grading an essay script for more than 10 minutes or so before the judgments become inconsistent. Two simple habits will help: before each pile of essays, take a few minutes to read through the grading rubric and examples for recalibration; take a break when you are grading more than about 10 scripts in a row. This will keep your upgrade in check. Grade inflation is often perpetuated by fatigue, not by a conscious desire to reward all students (grade deflation is more common in larger classes).

Providing Constructive Feedback

Feedback is important. A grade is just one part of the equation. But feedback needs to be formative – focussed on how to do better next time instead of why something didn’t work this time around. ‘This isn’t very good.’ ‘You didn’t answer the question.’ ‘The whole essay is wrong.’ These are the feedback I’ve been told a lot over the years. But they don’t really explain how to do better next time, which is why I always did worse. I felt like I was just doing this task for the sake of a grade. Grading doesn’t need to be like this. When I began changing my language, the students began taking the feedback seriously, and, I believe, giving it a lot more thought. They started to see that it was possible to get better instead of just saying ‘whatever’. As an educator, rewarded by the successes of my students, grading has changed my life forever.

Fostering a Positive Grading Environment

How teachers frame grading in terms of their attitude and mentality makes a difference. If a teacher approaches grading as something to do versus viewing it as something that can be done, students will likely sense this, and grading will be a more negative and tiring experience. A positive grading environment can be enriching not just for teachers, but for students as well. For instance, teachers may find more joy in their work. Similarly, student learning and engagement can be enhanced because feedback is more positively perceived and used.

Reflecting on the Grading Process

Then, hopefully, take some time to think about it. What went well? What might I change next time? This type of reflection will allow a teacher to evolve a grading practice that is increasingly efficient and effective as it is used over time. This will also lead to further insights about instructional practices that might need to be adjusted.

FAQs

Q: How can I ensure that my grading is fair and consistent?

A: To make sure that you’re being fair to all papers and consistent across papers, use a grading rubric that you’ve clearly defined for the raters: define the criteria from the perspective of an expert or more senior colleague, and spell out the criteria for each feature of the essay. Possibly, even take a look at the rubric and sample essays every once in a while.

Q: How can I manage dealing with a larger volume of essays than we had in the past?  

A: Divide up the grading work into smaller sections over days or weeks in advance. Make a plan for time spent on each piece of work and consider grading the introduction on one day to all the papers.

Q: How can I give meaningful feedback on essays in a timely manner?

A: Anchor your advice with boilerplate for the most common problems and detailed feedback for the particular issues that pertain most to this student. Look for one or two key areas where the student can improve, rather than talk about each mistake.

Q: What role can technology play in making grading easier?

A: Technology can help with grading. For example, grammar and syntax checks are already automated, as are comment banks and other tools designed to make giving of feedback quicker. Perhaps when that voice-to-text stuff really takes off, we’ll have passed the worst of it.

Q: How can peer review help in the grading process?

A: Peer review encourages students to give feedback to each other’s work, which in the end make their essays in higher quality. When students review their teacher they know more common mistakes that can be made, so next time students could avoid those mistakes and make an essay better and easier for teachers to grade them.