Assessing student writing can be a lengthy and consuming process. Here are some strategies to help you in this:

Before You Grade and Comment

• Articulate your learning objectives for the assignment. Do you want students to simply demonstrate an understanding of the material, or would you rather they extend that knowledge by synthesizing or applying what they’ve learned? This saves grading time by helping students write the right kind of essay and by helping you keep firmly in mind the traits that are most important to evaluate and provide feedback on.
• Provide your students with a handout or rubric that gives specific guidelines, or a checklist to clarify your expectations. Use it when grading the written assignment.
• Create and use a grading rubric. This can save you time by reducing grade challenges, because students will more likely understand the rationale for their grade.
• Good papers are easier and less time-consuming to grade than poor ones. Extra time spent giving students guidance through stepped assignments and multiple drafts reduces the amount of time spent on grading, and the students learn more through the process.
• If you are parsing an assignment someone else has created, zero in on the steps and the learning objectives of each step in completing the assignment.
• If you are designing your own assignment, consider: how compressed is students’ time in your course already? What do they have time for? How packed is your time? How long can you afford to spend teaching the assignment (if necessary) and reading through the students’ papers?
• Define your policies about receiving, proofreading, and editing drafts.
• Teach and require students to review each other’s work effectively in peer review teams.
• If you are grading for a section, evaluate the amount of papers you are expected to grade and, to the best of your ability, determine if you will be able to meet these expectations given the allotted hours of your GSI contract. If you anticipate difficulty, speak with your Instructor of Record. As your supervisor, the Instructor of Record is responsible for making sure the time expectations do not exceed what is stated in your appointment letter. Often, work can be redistributed or future assignments tailored to help respect your own time constraints.

While You Grade and Comment

• When you evaluate student work, keep your focus on the learning objectives of the assignment or the particular knowledge and skills it was designed to assess. Don’t be distracted by extraneous matters, such as marking superficial mistakes.
• Do a quick “first pass” for essays, making no or extremely minimal marks. Then, go back for a more thorough read, marking and commenting on areas of most immediate concern. Try to restrict yourself to only 2-3 major areas of concern.
• If you are grading digitally, keep a document of common phrases and or pieces of feedback. You can copy and paste from this document directly into the student essay.
• Some GSIs find the “Speed Grader” function of bCourses a useful way to grade more quickly. The “Speed Grader” function automatically collates your students’ essays and allows in-text commenting and end-comments.

More tips and approaches can be found in the Grading Student Work section of the Teaching Guide.