Since marking is one of my biggest challenges, I thought it deserved a bonus post. Though I’ve received helpful information from PIDP courses and the Brookfield text, I realized I hadn’t yet consulted the oracle of oracles on all subjects under the sun: YouTube.

I ended up finding a helpful video, with the somewhat clickbaity title “How to Grade an Essay in 5 Minutes Max”. Well, they hooked me, and I’m glad they did. Despite being geared towards middle school teachers, some of the same principles for marking written assignments can apply at the post-secondary level. I’m a firm believer that any quality idea or resource is scalable for the setting you need it for, provided you bring some creativity to it.

The main point in this video is to use a really robust grading rubric. This is something I’ve already been doing, but some of my assignments have been lacking rubrics that go into enough detail to make marking the almost automatic, completely effortless process this video promises it can be. This is especially true for my Moodle discussion forums (which I use a lot); the rubric just isn’t fleshed out enough. This inspires me to review my rubrics and make sure they’re doing enough of the evaluation work for me.

The second point in this video is to resist the urge to write comments on the paper itself. Instead, they suggest circling or underlining things on the rubric sheet and writing 1-2 sentences of comments at the bottom. I loved the suggestion of developing a few basic grading symbols to write directly on the student’s writing, for instance using an underline to highlight something a student has done particularly well, or a circle for something problematic, or brackets for something that needs more work. Why didn’t I think of this before? It saves so much time having to write out the same comments over and over again.

The final tip is to have the students reflect on their own papers by giving them a response handout to fill out after they get their work back and read through their feedback. This is brilliant! The guided questions are things like, “Identify one area where you feel you were successful, and explain why. Now, identify one area in your assignment where improvement is needed, and explain why.” You can even ask them to choose one or two sentences to rewrite, and/or what strategies they used to make their writing stronger.

Getting students to do more self-assessment and reflection is a core part of many of the PIDP courses I’ve taken so far. I’ve gotten better at doing it as a student myself, and I do find it useful. In my early teaching days, I would spend hours marking essays, hand them back to the students, and have to way of knowing if they’d even read them or taken them to heart. Self-reflective assessments are something I’m slowly starting to incorporate more into my own courses. Each year, I try to make small improvements where I can. It never ends!