The grading thread

[RatGuy]

Someone on the old Jedi Mind Tricks thread taught me this gem:

Make the final project/essay due a week earlier than normal. Have that date on the syllabus. A few weeks before the due date, announce "You can have an extension if you'd like it. The due date is now a week later. But since it's right before finals, I won't have time to offer feedback or comments."

It's a win-win! The good students do it early and take the feedback. The slacker students take the extension, thinking they've won, but really I don't spend a lot of time grading their submissions. It also means that the week before exams, usually frantic with grading, is currently smooth sailing. Thanks Fora Jedi!

[AvidReader]

Someone on the old Jedi Mind Tricks thread taught me this gem:

I love this. I wish my dept. did not require inline comments on all graded essays. They are for the people who apparently "spot check" all faculty work--I know most of my students won't be reading comments. Grr.

AR.

[ergative]

Friggin' late submissions. I had finished grading weeks ago and now two more essays pop up like zits.

Time to go pop some zits, I guess.

The mentality is left over from their high school days. High school teachers generally allow late submissions.

It used to be that college professors were the ones that taught these students about deadlines, the hard way.

To be fair to the students, we have a pretty standard extension policy, with paperwork and everything that must be submitted to request one. These were legitimate extensions, requested and granted in advance. But, y'know, even if you can feel a zit developing under your skin, it's still not fun when it erupts on schedule.

Update: the plagiarism cases have now been decided. I must now grade those essays, while 'disregarding the plagiarized portions'. Argh.

(This is not a miscarriage of justice; they also get grade penalties on top of whatever their non-plagiarized portions earn, and a permanent red flagon their academic record. For baby first years this is fine.)

[mamselle]

If there's a lot of plagiarized material, there may also be very little left to grade, resulting in an "incomplete fulfillment of assignment requirements" check on the rubric, and so a lowered grade on what's left.

M.

[the_geneticist]

I have to manually grade 2 of the 12 questions in an exam because Canvas apparently can't do partial credit on certain question types. 
I've finished 6 of the 20 lab sections. 

Next time, I'm making sure that grading exams is part of the TA contract!

[larryc]

GnG: Glance and grade. It is the way.

Open the assignment in speed grader (on Canvas, anyway). Read the first page. Skim the rest. Paste a comment from the document of generic paper comments you have open in another tab. Submit. Next. Spend no more than 3 minutes per assignment.

As you are grading have another document where you make notes about common strengths and problems. Then make a course announcement about these. Give global feedback, not individual feedback. A friend who keeps up on pedagogical research tells me this is proven to be more effective because they don't take it personally. I just stumbled into it. Lately I have been recording these global feedback sessions as a short video, students seem to like that.

Here is the huge advantage of GnG: Because you spend less time grading, you can assign far more writing. I get through 40-50 four-page essays in two hours.

I am in the humanities, YMMV.

[the_geneticist]

GnG: Glance and grade. It is the way.

Open the assignment in speed grader (on Canvas, anyway). Read the first page. Skim the rest. Paste a comment from the document of generic paper comments you have open in another tab. Submit. Next. Spend no more than 3 minutes per assignment.

As you are grading have another document where you make notes about common strengths and problems. Then make a course announcement about these. Give global feedback, not individual feedback. A friend who keeps up on pedagogical research tells me this is proven to be more effective because they don't take it personally. I just stumbled into it. Lately I have been recording these global feedback sessions as a short video, students seem to like that.

Here is the huge advantage of GnG: Because you spend less time grading, you can assign far more writing. I get through 40-50 four-page essays in two hours.

I am in the humanities, YMMV.

Ooo!  I like the idea of "global feedback".  There are some common themes of concepts that students are misunderstanding.  And looks like folks are also losing points due to not looking at the diagrams.  I'm in STEM so it's not too hard to write challenging multiple-choice questions; choose all correct; complete the statement; calculated-based, etc.

[arcturus]

GnG: Glance and grade. It is the way.

Open the assignment in speed grader (on Canvas, anyway). Read the first page. Skim the rest. Paste a comment from the document of generic paper comments you have open in another tab. Submit. Next. Spend no more than 3 minutes per assignment.

As you are grading have another document where you make notes about common strengths and problems. Then make a course announcement about these. Give global feedback, not individual feedback. A friend who keeps up on pedagogical research tells me this is proven to be more effective because they don't take it personally. I just stumbled into it. Lately I have been recording these global feedback sessions as a short video, students seem to like that.

Here is the huge advantage of GnG: Because you spend less time grading, you can assign far more writing. I get through 40-50 four-page essays in two hours.

I am in the humanities, YMMV.

Ooo!  I like the idea of "global feedback".  There are some common themes of concepts that students are misunderstanding.  And looks like folks are also losing points due to not looking at the diagrams.  I'm in STEM so it's not too hard to write challenging multiple-choice questions; choose all correct; complete the statement; calculated-based, etc.

I also use global feedback for most of the assignments in my large general education online course. We provide a numerical score for each student, but no comments on the individual weekly assignments, just a global course announcement regarding common misconceptions or difficulties.

@larryc The one hiccup in the above is for scaffolded activities, where I want students to incorporate the feedback into the next step in the project. For that, I use copy-paste from a list of applicable comments for each individual student (with a few individually written, for the students who are way out in left field). However, I find the scaffolded projects to be much more time intensive to grade, not only due to the additional copy-paste step, but also because I find that I need to look at the previous assignment to verify that we did, indeed, provide appropriate feedback that the student subsequently ignored. Do you have advice on how to approach grading scaffolded assignments efficiently?

[Parasaurolophus]

6 exams, 7 papers, and 36 quizzes down today. Not bad for a few hours' work!

Plus, it turns out my deadline is May 3, not April 27! Wheeee@

[Sun_Worshiper]

I'm caught up on grading, but I have a dozen papers coming to me tomorrow night and 40 exams coming to me on Tuesday of next week.

[downer]

Netflix 'n' Grade.

Am I right?

[Parasaurolophus]

Marked 15 papers and three straggler quizzes. That's enough for today!

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

I have 2 sets of tests to grade and another set that is half done. Today is the day to grade lab reports. Yuck.

[Charlotte]

Woke up early this morning and couldn't sleep so I graded for awhile and got several term papers completed. I have 11 more to go this weekend and then Sunday night about 25 more will roll in. But I can see the end of the semester in sight!

[fishbrains]

Netflix 'n' Grade.

Am I right?

I didn't know Netflix made bourbon. You really do learn something new every day.