Taking the Hassle Out of Grading

-Don’t grade every assignment!  Grading is one of the most time-consuming tasks teachers face, and it’s worse the older your students are.  To determine whether or not to grade an assignment, ask yourself if the assignment:

            Is a true assessment of what kids have learned (group, partner, and teacher-lead
                        assignments usually are not)

Is the only assessment of a particular concept or skill you have given (if you are

giving two papers on proper nouns, you don’t need to grade them both- one can just be for practice; if you are only giving one, you probably want to grade it to see how your kids are doing)

Measures a skill or concept you need to know if students are mastering (I rarely

grade spelling assignments because I know the words are appropriate for the students- I have leveled spelling groups- and there will be a test that same week for me to determine how well they have learned the words; also, some assignments are just given for review and don’t need to be graded)

-Look over 3-6 papers of each assignment you are not grading to see if students are getting it.  You can choose randomly or view selected students’ work (I would choose low to average performing students- I know certain students almost always master what you teach, and certain others very rarely get it the first time, so I pick students in the middle range).  Look over those papers for common mistakes or excessive errors to see if you need to reteach- if things look okay, stamp them as follows:

-Use a ‘Read But Not Corrected’ stamp for those papers you choose not to grade.  Placing a check mark at the top of a paper which has errors on it can send the message to students and parents that you are not checking work or that you are being careless.  A stamp like this one (purchased at a craft or teacher supply store/catalog) prevents that misunderstanding.

-Have student helpers stamp papers for you.  If you have a teacher-lead assignment in which every students’ paper is correct, or there are no right answers, or you want to stamp ‘read but not corrected’, give the stack to a student to stamp for you.  S/he is not seeing anyone’s grades so there are no confidentiality violations.  It’s an easy, fun job that saves a lot of time for you.

-Don’t grade homework assignments!!  If you give two assignments per night, say spelling and math, and you have 25 kids, that’s 50 papers to grade every night, or 200 a week for Monday-Thursday!  Shave hours off of your grading time by collecting homework and recording whether or not it is completed.  If it is, they get a 100; if it’s not, they get a 0.  Simple as that.  You could also give a 50 if the work was begun but incomplete.  Remember, some kids have a lot of parental support at home, some have none, and still others have people who do the entire assignment for them.  Homework is NOT a true measure of what a child knows and in my opinion, is not worth the time it takes to grade.  If you don’t believe this, compare the classwork and homework grades of the kids in your class.  You will probably find that some get A’s on things completed at home but mysteriously ‘forget’ how to do the work in class and on tests.   Grade the work you see being done right in front of you, in class.

-Don’t grade work done with a substitute teacher.  This is not a reflection on the teaching abilities of subs.  The fact is, if you aren’t there, you don’t know if a child copied the work, was allowed to work with a partner, received excessive help from the sub, or was given no help at all even though you would have helped if you had been there.  Students do not turn in work of the same quality when you are not present, just like with homework.  Chalk it up as practice work, give it a ‘Read But Not Corrected’ stamp, and send it home.

-Have students grade their own papers.  I don’t advocate them switching papers, although the courts have allowed this practice legally, because if I were a child who got a bad grade, I would not want my peers to know.  Have students put their pencils away and take out a crayon to grade.  Let them know that anyone caught with a pencil out will have their paper taken away and graded by you, and if they are caught changing any answers, they get an automatic zero with the paper photocopied and sent home with a note for parental signature.  (I had a very sneaky class one year and had a ‘Grading Monitor’ walk around the room as an extra pair of eyes while we graded- s/he was student who typically got A’s and I would grade the paper myself later on).   I like this method not only because it saves time, but because students get immediate feedback as to what type of errors they are making.  Sometimes I like to have students reflect in writing before they grade:  How well do you think you understand this material?  And afterwards reflect on what they learned by grading it using one or more of the following prompts:  Did you understand as well as thought?  What parts of the assignment were easiest for you?  Hardest?  Is there anything you need your teacher to help you understand better?  On a scale of 1-10, how well do you think you understand what we learned?

-Grade papers while students are working on them.  I have heard of a teacher who assigns two papers, the most important one (to be graded) first, and a lesser or reinforcement paper to be completed second.  Students work independently or with her circulating around the room, then she calls them to her desk as they finish.  The teacher grades the paper with the student watching, often sending the children back to make corrections if needed.  She records the grades right then and there, and students work on the second paper (which just gets a check mark) when they are done.  This method save the teacher time, provided individual assistance and feedback to kids, and ensures that grades are recorded right away without a stack of papers piling up.

-Grade papers with easy formats.  Multiple choice, fill in the blank, and matching are the obvious choices, but there are lots of other ways, too:

For long assignments or those you plan to use for several years, make

photocopies of bubble sheets (like those used on standardized tests) and

have your students fill them in instead of writing answers on paper.  Place a blank transparency over a bubble sheet answer key you have made and mark the correct bubbles with permanent marker on the transparency.  When you are ready to grade students’ papers, place the transparency over the students’ paper and count how many bubbles don’t match up between the students’ sheet and the answer transparency.  I grade my students’ Scholastic Reading Inventory tests this way and can get through an entire class set (45 questions each) in less than 10 minutes. 

For circle the correct answer/ multiple choice papers, have students write their

answers on a separate sheet of paper.  It is much easier to grade this:

            1.B

            2.D

            3.A

than it is to flip through the question paper and find the answers that students circled.  With this method, you can also re-use the same test year after year and save on photocopies.

When grading multi-page assignments, grade the first page for each student, then

the second page for each student, and so on, rather than grading the entire

test for one student at a time.  This is an invaluable tip that I learned years back and am so grateful for.  When grading one page at a time, you tend to ‘memorize’ the answers, making it quicker to spot errors.   Write the number the student got wrong at the bottom of the page, such as –0 or –3, and then after you have graded the whole stack, go back through and count up how many the student got wrong by looking at the minus-however many you wrote at the bottom.

Give color-by-answer assignments.  Print out coloring sheets from the internet or

use coloring book pages.  Write a problem in each section and make a key.  For example, you could write a math equation in each section (if the answer is less than 10, color it blue, 10-20 color it red, etc.)  or write special or vocabulary words (color nouns yellow, verbs green, etc., or color words with two syllables purple, or color only the words that are parts of a flower such as stem, leaf, etc.).  The possibilities are endless.  Kids LOVE these, and you can grade each paper within seconds simply by looking to see if the colored page looks like the answer key you made or a correct student sample. 

-Give less paperwork.  Use wipe-off boards for instant individual assessment and feedback during lessons.   Use centers, discussions, group activities, and other activities to see what kids are learning.  Yes, you need documentation of how kids are doing, but not on every skill.  Focus on the state mandates and use non-written assessment methods for other concepts and skills.

-Use accurate student papers instead of making answer keys.  After the first quarter, you have a pretty good idea of which students will have all the right answers on their papers.  Check two or three of those students’ papers against each other first, and find one that is correct.  Use that paper to check all other students’ work against.   This is much quicker than making an answer key, and if you photocopy the child’s paper, you can save it and use it for the key again the following year.

-Use an EZ Grader. This little device allows you to have any number of problems or questions in an assignment and calculates the grade.  This prevents you from having to choose easy numbers, such as 10, and making each question 10 points each.  Having 27 questions, or 34, is no problem.  You can buy these for about $5 at teacher supply stores, or download one here.

-Don’t let papers go ungraded for more than a week, tops.  (Easier said than done!)  However, more than once I have been in the middle of grading a tedious math worksheet when I realized I had already tested the kids on the material.  What’s the point of grading the practice classwork?  It was too late for me to assess whether or not they were getting it, and because I never provided them feedback on what they did, it’s possible that a number of them had used the assignment to practice incorrect methodologies.  It was a waste for me and them.