Hiring a private grader?

[aginghipster]

Thanks all for some very good comments. I'll start by being transparent with my dean and ask what resources are available. If none, then I may try to hire out some other life burdens.

And yes, some streamlining of curriculum is a must—even though I've been cutting and cutting it for the last six years or so.

Teaching used to be a kinda beautiful thing.

[clean]

When I first saw this I read it as "hiring a private gardener".  I was interested in applying!  After today's faculty meeting, I would much rather deal with weeds and mowing grass in August heat! 

As for hiring a private grader, the advice against it is all correct. 
You can hire out other parts of your life, but your university contracted with YOU to do the teaching part/chore, and that includes Grading what is assigned! 

hire out the gardening, not the grading! 

[Hegemony]

My life became exponentially easier once I learned to set up (cheat-proof) self-grading quizzes on Canvas. If your place uses Canvas, send me a message and I'll send you my handy-dandy quick guide to making the quizzes, which I prepared for my department when we started online teaching. (They can be used in in-person classes, obviously; it's just that they take place online.) I think automatically graded quizzes are the only way to have a lot of graded assignments and your sanity in the same semester.

[Wahoo Redux]

Your university is not supporting you.  They have given you an unreasonable amount of work to do. Do the absolute minimum.

Grade as quickly as you can and as easily as you can.  Literally, skim to make sure all the basic criteria are there and move on.  If a students wants feedback, make them come to or video-conference during your office hours. Use rubrics.

I am ashamed and sorry not sorry to say that this is how I am grading my final projects in this, my last semester after receiving my NTT non-renewal notice.  My days of working hard for my uni are over.  So should yours. 

[AJ_Katz]

What kind of things are you grading?  Have you considered consulting with someone about how you might be able to streamline your assessments so that they take less time to grade?

One of the things I used do to do was to align the answer space to a blank line that lines up on the right-hand side of the paper.  For simple write-in responses, I could overlap and spread out the papers on a single table, which allowed me to scan from left to right for all of the papers at a single time and very rapidly identify wrong answers.  Something that previously could have taken me several hours to grade probably took me less than 30 minutes with that simple method.

That's just one example.  So I wonder if there are other pedagogically backed methods for revising your assessments so that students are still meeting the learning outcomes, but not at your personal expense.  I would find someone on campus or elsewhere to get professional input about how to streamline the grading without reducing the quality of the course.

[Caracal]

You stated that you did not want to hear about fewer assignments, different grading practices, or automated grading. I can sympathize with this sentiment, since it feels like we are reducing the quality of the teaching/learning experience by making changes along these lines. However, there is a reason why these topics come up. It does not sound like your university is willing to provide the resources for an ideal educational experience (1 on 1 tutoring comes to mind...), so you need to prioritize the activities in your courses that are most beneficial for student learning and either compromise on the others or drive yourself batty with too high a workload.

Agree. If the school won't provide faculty with resources (TA s, lower enrollments, fewer classes) to do their job properly, then you classes will have to reflect that in various ways. If I had fewer students, I would provide more feedback on exams. As it is, I tell students there is a rubric and if they have questions I'm happy to talk to them. There's not some standard you are required to uphold regardless of the strain on you, and in this case, the damage to your finances and career.

[Caracal]

Teaching used to be a kinda beautiful thing.

I try to grade less and teach more. You don't necessarily have to cut the things you are teaching, just the assignments. Use rubrics when its helpful to reduce the amount of written feedback you have to provide. . If students want to come talk to you about their assignments, be available, but you don't need to be writing a ton on assessments. If you have low stakes assignments, like reading quizzes, automated grading is your friend.

The grading is a necessary task, most of the time in teaching, but it isn't something that I really think is particularly valuable or important and I'd sooner be spending my time on other things.

[downer]

I find the best time to plan a syllabus for next semester is just after I've gone through the grading crunch of the current semester. It helps keep me realistic.

Sometimes my trend is to reduce the number of assignments. But I also have added in different kinds of assignments. I'm planning to add short student presentations to one online course.

[Ruralguy]

You are right, that's probably the best time, but it's too depressing.

[arcturus]

I find the best time to plan a syllabus for next semester is just after I've gone through the grading crunch of the current semester. It helps keep me realistic.

Sometimes my trend is to reduce the number of assignments. But I also have added in different kinds of assignments. I'm planning to add short student presentations to one online course.

This sounds great, until you realize that a 5 minute presentation (a) doesn't have a lot of content and (b) requires 5 minutes of your time to watch [scale appropriately].  I can grade written work much more quickly than oral, except in the case where I would be using the time anyway - such as an in person or synchronous online course. Perhaps your online course is the latter, in which case I withdraw my concern about the time required to grade oral presentations.

[downer]

I find the best time to plan a syllabus for next semester is just after I've gone through the grading crunch of the current semester. It helps keep me realistic.

Sometimes my trend is to reduce the number of assignments. But I also have added in different kinds of assignments. I'm planning to add short student presentations to one online course.

This sounds great, until you realize that a 5 minute presentation (a) doesn't have a lot of content and (b) requires 5 minutes of your time to watch [scale appropriately].  I can grade written work much more quickly than oral, except in the case where I would be using the time anyway - such as an in person or synchronous online course. Perhaps your online course is the latter, in which case I withdraw my concern about the time required to grade oral presentations.

I watch recorded student presentations at 1.5x speed, so they go faster. The goal is not just to get them to learn info, but also to develop other skills such as organizing the info. If I add presentations, then I take away some other requirements, keeping the workload even.

I've tried it in other courses and it worked fairly well. In this course, the students have a wider variety of abilities, so it may not work so well, in which case I will discontinue the experiment. Part of the issue for me is the boredom of reading student work. Sometimes I find relief in watching student presentations. Other students may also learn from watching each other's presentations.

[Caracal]

I find the best time to plan a syllabus for next semester is just after I've gone through the grading crunch of the current semester. It helps keep me realistic.

Sometimes my trend is to reduce the number of assignments. But I also have added in different kinds of assignments. I'm planning to add short student presentations to one online course.

This sounds great, until you realize that a 5 minute presentation (a) doesn't have a lot of content and (b) requires 5 minutes of your time to watch [scale appropriately].  I can grade written work much more quickly than oral, except in the case where I would be using the time anyway - such as an in person or synchronous online course. Perhaps your online course is the latter, in which case I withdraw my concern about the time required to grade oral presentations.

I watch recorded student presentations at 1.5x speed, so they go faster. The goal is not just to get them to learn info, but also to develop other skills such as organizing the info. If I add presentations, then I take away some other requirements, keeping the workload even.

I've tried it in other courses and it worked fairly well. In this course, the students have a wider variety of abilities, so it may not work so well, in which case I will discontinue the experiment. Part of the issue for me is the boredom of reading student work. Sometimes I find relief in watching student presentations. Other students may also learn from watching each other's presentations.

Yeah, I have students submit PowerPoints with text for some classes. Basically its like a presentation that they don't actually present. It's nice to be able to grade something that isn't just a bunch of text on a page.

[Biologist_]

My department does have a grader program through which faculty can apply for a limited amount of funds to pay MS or undergraduate students to grade for us. Depending on which class(es) I'm teaching in a given term and the level and number of students, I often apply and get something like 25 to 30 hours of student grader time. I usually hire a senior who I know from a previous class and have the student help grade the lab homework, quizzes, etc. I grade the exams.

Some of the lab homework grading is fairly complex, as it involves evaluating graphs and figure captions, etc. For student assistance to work well, I start with a student who has demonstrated an ability to do that sort of classwork exceptionally well.  Ideally, I then grade a subset of the student work for each question within each assignment to provide some examples of the comments and scores. The student can then use my examples in lieu of an itemized rubric. Practically, I have done this in various ways. One is to provide the student grader with electronic copies of the graded work from a previous iteration of the course. Another is to take advantage of LMS features for shared grading responsibilities. That way, I can grade a quarter or a third of the work (enough to capture some of the range of issues) and have the grader take it from there. As I grade, I populate a set of pre-written comments that the grader can use or adjust as needed.

I make a point to review a subset of the graded work and make sure it meets my standards. Just the other day, I went through and edited some of the comments and scores that my current grader applied to lab homework. In general, he's doing a great job and saving me a lot of time but sometimes there are minor adjustments that are worth the trouble.

I have considered offering to pay the student cash for a few more hours of grading if we run out of approved hours but I have never gotten to the point that I needed to do that. I don't think that would run afoul of the FERPA or ethical issues noted above as the student would already be approved for the type of work they are doing and the information to which they have access. Similarly, I would be approved for using assistance to get the grading done. Maybe the OP could ask the chair or dean for some low level of support and be transparent about OP's plans to top that up as needed? Or maybe that's not a good idea either?

[Aster]

A 5-4 teaching load is just a hair shy of a 100% teaching-only contract. There is virtually zero allocation for meaningful activity in either service or research.

I normally only see standard teaching loads that high at community colleges or for-profit universities. I'm much more familiar with 4-4 or lower loads for teaching-focused SLAC's.

Yuk.

[mamselle]

+1^

This is also consistent with the received wisdom that delegation is at best/at most a 1/3-1/2 gain of time and effort.

You can never completely delegate away all the demands of a task, because oversight and final compilation of findings are still lodged with the original task holder.

M.