Imagine you are a teacher or a college professor having to grade 5 classes worth of essays with 30 students each. Not just any essays but ten-page long essays for their final assessment of the year. You would need some helpful techniques to use to grade those essays efficiently and objectively. And while many might assume grading essays to be an easy task. I mean from the outside it does seem like all you have to do is read through the essay and judge it based on how you felt like he or she did. However, grading essays require much more technical skills, time, and consideration to grade it. And if you think about it most of the time it is something that puts a student’s grades or future on the line so as much as it is time-consuming teachers and whoever else grades the test needs to put in the time and effort to grade the tests well. So here are some of the best ways teachers can grade an essay.
The first technique is to always provide a rubric for the students to follow through. This way not only you can easily have something to always refer back to when grading your essay. There will also be many instances where the students will try arguing for a higher grade or try finding loopholes in your grading so to prevent such scenarios from happening you can always refer to the rubric for evidence of certain areas the students failed to meet the requirement and standards. Also by clearly defining all the requirements to get a certain grade and the differences between each grade, it makes sure you have consistency across your grading as you would want to prevent giving one student an advantage over others because you didn’t set clear requirements for yourself.
The second technique is to put in short comments and feedback when grading. As many people know grading isn’t just about giving a person one letter grade. There’s so much more to it. By leaving short comments, it can be short as 1-2 sentences, on the areas the student failed to achieve or did a very good job on it will give a sense of personalization to the students. The feeling that you put the time and effort into grading that student’s piece of writing instead of you just blindly giving them a letter grade. Even for me, I’ve always loved reading comments teachers left for me in graded assignments as it let me know the areas I could have improved on or made me feel good about the areas they complimented me on. This again also prevents students from questioning why they got the grade they did as you will already have explained in the comment you left. And of course the longer the comment the better. But the idea is just to make your grading more than just one letter grade, especially in essay grading where grading can be very subjective.
Also, a very big thing when it comes to grading essays or any pieces of writing is plagiarism. This is probably the biggest problem when it comes to essay writing because even unintentional or accidental plagiarism can get you from a grade A to immediately an F. So checking for plagiarism is essential. To not waste time copying each of the text (if it’s online) into a separate plagiarism checker just make the students submit it through “Turn it in” where it automatically checks for plagiarism in the student’s work. Make your life easier and more efficient.
The last final technique is to read out what you reading. Something you can feel yourself just skimming through the text. You’re reading the text however none of the information is going through and getting processed in your brain. Or you can also grade it while teh student who wrote the essay reads it out in real-time. This is sometimes very helpful as you can hear the emotions and intentions the author wanted to convey in the essay which sometimes goes unnoticed when someone else is reading it. This according to owlcation.com can reduce your essay grading time to 10-15 minutes although it does require the students to do more.
In conclusion, because essay grading is such a subjective task it is usually one of the harder assignments to grade for many instructors. And because essay grading mainly comes in the form of assignments, from the student’s perspective, what grade you give them will greatly have an impact on their lives. So while grading essays might seem like an easy unimportant task it is equally as important as other tasks and should never be overlooked. Thus following the techniques listed above might to some extent help guide you in doing so.
By: Seohyun Lee
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