How to Keep Up With Grading Papers
If you work as a teacher or professor, you may feel swamped by your grading duties at times. When you've got a mountain of ungraded papers on your desk and a potential all-nighter ahead of you, the task can seem downright daunting. However, there's no need to despair. Effective time management and goal setting can help you reduce that mountain to nothing in time to get a good night's sleep. Keeping up with grading papers is easier than it seems if you follow a few simple tips.
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Instructions
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Plan in advance. Set reasonable time frames to return papers to your students -- a week is a good rule of thumb. Figure out how many papers you need to grade per day in order to meet your goal, and grade at least that number of papers each day. Set daily grading goals to keep yourself on track.
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Give yourself a break. While it's tempting to just plow through as many as you can, you'll eventually become fatigued and your productivity will rapidly decrease, especially when grading essays. Every three papers or so, get up and take a walk around the block, fix yourself a cold drink or pet the dog. Conversely, avoid taking breaks until you've met your goal -- that includes breaks to check email or social networking sites.
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For multiple choice tests, try the "page at a time" grading method to minimize time spent reading the same question over and over. Grade all the first pages first, tallying the number of questions the student answered correctly at the bottom of the page. At the end, tally up each student's individual score.
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Stay organized. Make spreadsheets to track your grading progress by assignment, using multiple sheets if you're juggling many assignments at once.
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References
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