15 Time-Tested Strategies to Reduce Grading Time

What’s your least favorite part about teaching?

There are many contenders: disrespect and apathy from students, ubiquitous cell phones, difficult relationships with parents, campus politics, society’s attitude toward teachers, the list could go on. And, to be honest, these are some of the top issues that push teachers out of the classroom. They were for us.

But when it comes to the daily grind, grading time has to be at the top of most English teachers’ lists.

Grading is, obviously, a necessary part of our jobs. At the most practical level, we need to measure student mastery of our content, we need to assign grades, and true learning requires feedback. And if you’ve taught for any length of time, you know that the second students find out work isn’t for a grade (or won’t be looked at closely), they stop doing it or give it only the most perfunctory effort.

But grading time is also tedious and rarely rewarding. When teaching high school, we likely have close to 200 students, so every submitted assignment results in piles of time-consuming work (when we still have plenty of other tasks to do). It’s, quite frankly, boring to read the same thing over and over. It’s discouraging to see student work that doesn’t meet your expectations and incredibly frustrating to discover academic dishonesty.

It’s also hard. Sure, there are assignments that are easy to grade, but so much of grading in English is subjective. We have to decide if the student’s awkward phrasing changes their meaning or is close enough to what they should have written to earn credit. We have to track beginning writers’ lines of reasoning in an effort to give them every possibility to earn points. We have to decide which row of a rubric student work falls in, a task that can come down to subtle nuance and numerical gymnastics. These tasks take mental effort, and the more advanced the class, the more effort grading requires.

We never came to “like” grading. Steph has three paragraphs (not three piles of paragraphs—literally three paragraphs) from her summer class lingering on her desk that she hasn’t been able to make grading time for yet.

But we did find ways to reduce grading time and make it more bearable. And because we’re nearly positive we’re not alone in seeing grading time as a chore, we’re spreading the wealth.

Our Favorite 15 Strategies to Make Grading Time More Manageable

This is a humbling question. We all have so many creative ideas that we hope will help students learn.

But the longer we were in the classroom, the more we realized that we were giving students way too much work—for us and for them. We started to be more thoughtful about whether each assignment actually contributed to our lesson or unit goal. We started nixing ideas for activities we knew we wouldn’t want to grade.

This helped us because it reduced the number of assignments we had to grade, but it also helped our students. As our pace slowed, we were able to give them more time to complete assignments and more support as they did so. More students turned assignments in, which meant grades improved, which meant parents, counselors, and administrators were happier. It was definitely a change worth making.

When we started assigning guided reading questions to accompany our AP Literature novels, we assigned a lot of questions. After all, if the questions were meant to guide them through the reading, shouldn’t we ask a question each time an important point arose?

But then we had to grade a lot of responses, and what we had intended to be a tool to help students had become a burdensome project, for us and for them. We started to spend quite a bit of time reviewing our guided reading questions and eliminating any that weren’t essential to the focus and approach we would be using in our class discussions and activities.

Eventually, we realized that even that approach needed revision. We started making most of our guided reading questions multiple choice, and then choosing one or two questions per reading assignment that we wanted students to construct a short-answer response for. 

Yes, we realized that it would be easy for students to cheat on the multiple-choice questions, but many of them were doing that anyway with their longer responses and trying to disguise it, leading us to spend hours checking Turnitin reports and comparing student submissions. We just couldn’t keep making ourselves miserable to prevent cheating. 

Students who genuinely wanted to learn were still being guided through the assignment, all students had their attention drawn to the most important points, we had fewer Turnitin reports to analyze, and we could provide specific and targeted feedback on one question per student. This felt a lot more manageable.

Not every assignment is worth your grading time, and it’s impossible to provide feedback on every single piece of work students produce.
Think carefully about which assignments matter most to you and which assignments can be for a completion grade. We liked to put completion assignments in a participation category (weighted lower than our homework/classwork category) so that assignments we valued enough to spend time commenting on didn’t get swallowed up by the cumulative point totals of a bunch of minor assignments.

If you’re grading a short-answer quiz, create a scoring guide with point values for each element you want students to mention. As you review each response, you can put a little checkmark next to each key point and then add up the total. For an assignment where you’re looking for specific answers, this is much easier and quicker than trying to evaluate each response holistically. If you work in a PLC, you can come up with this scoring guide together, allowing for consistency across classes.

If you’re grading anything else—especially projects and writing assignments—create a rubric and use it. This saves you grading time, increases the likelihood that you’ll score consistently, and provides students with some direct feedback about their performance without you having to write personalized comments.

It’s tempting to comment on every single problem we see in student work. But targeted feedback is more helpful for students, and commenting on everything means we can spend hours working our way through a single stack of papers.

Choose one element to focus on for each assignment, and restrict yourself to only writing comments about that one thing. Students can get feedback about the rest of their assignment from the descriptors on the rubric, they can focus on improving the one thing you focused on, and you can move more quickly through a stack of papers. For those short-answer responses on our guided reading questions, we liked to focus on one aspect of the 5C paragraph at a time, an effective tool for us that we could see impacting our students’ writing.

After your first few assignments, start to pay attention to which students try to apply the feedback and which students consistently ignore it. If you have a student who never applies your comments and never makes an effort to revise, stop wasting your time writing detailed feedback on those students’ responses. Keep it quick and to-the-point, perhaps even using a generic copy-paste comment. Save your valuable and limited time and effort for those students who actually appreciate and use it.

It took us a while to accept that what we should do wasn’t necessarily what we could do. Do our students need frequent writing practice? Of course. Could we keep up with the grading if we assigned an essay a week? Absolutely not.

If we’re going to provide feedback on student work, we need to get it back to them soon enough that they have a chance to apply it (studies say the sooner, the better). So we need to be realistic about how much time we can devote to grading and how quickly we can grade a set of papers, and then we must adjust our planning accordingly.

For us, this meant calculating how long it would take to grade (and provide feedback on) an assignment and then not assigning the same type of assignment until we could get the previous one back to students. It made a huge difference to our ability to stay on top of grading when we set a pace we could actually keep up with instead of what was theoretically best for students.
Since we came to rely so heavily on short-answer responses to evaluate both reading and writing skills, we also had to consider the amount of time it would take to provide feedback on these responses and build some grading time into our lesson plans. We would add days for students to work on a long-term project, take a breather with a more creative activity, or watch a review video and make revisions on the previous assignment. This made the grading load more manageable for us, made the workload more manageable for our students, and increased the number of students who took time to revise and resubmit their responses.

When we taught Elie Wiesel’s Night, we had students write an essay about how Wiesel changed over the course of his experiences during the Holocaust. We had them write the body paragraphs as they read the book (Wiesel’s character trait at the beginning, Wiesel’s character trait in the middle, and Wiesel’s character trait at the end), and then when they were done, we had them go back and write the introduction and conclusion and format all the separate pieces into an essay.

It was so much easier for us to grade one paragraph at a time, and we tended to have higher student participation because individual paragraphs felt less overwhelming than a full essay.

If you teach stronger writers, this isn’t a strategy you should rely on regularly; after all, these students need to learn to plan a line of reasoning based on a prompt. But it is certainly an approach you can try, and for large and complex projects, it still absolutely works. Steph teaches AP Research, and students complete their 4000–5000 word academic paper in parts over the course of the year, allowing both students and teacher to focus on one element at a time.

Now, this idea won’t work for everyone. But, if you have a strong collaborative partnership with another teacher, consider taking a “divide and conquer” approach to grading. 

The two of us collaborated so closely that it was as if we were co-teaching one big class. We were creating assignments together, following the same pacing, and even checking in between periods about how things went and what on-the-fly revisions were needed. After many years teaching this way, we trusted each other enough to start tackling even our grading in a collaborative manner.

For our novel units, Kate would grade all of the guided reading questions for both of our classes, and Steph would grade all of the flip books for both classes. It’s much easier to get into a rhythm with one assignment (and we both got to trade an assignment we didn’t love grading for one we found not so bad). This was also better for our students: with the same person scoring both classes, there was more consistency in our scoring, and all students were held accountable to the same expectations.

We used this approach for essays, too: whenever we assigned an in-class essay, we allowed students to choose from a couple prompts (to model the “choice” element of Q3 on the AP Lit exam) or assigned multiple versions (to cut down on cheating). One of us would take all the Prompt A essays, and the other would take all the Prompt B essays, allowing us to avoid going back and forth between multiple prompts and, again, ensuring consistency for our students.

If you’re thinking of trying this strategy, it’s important to norm first or score together (at least at the beginning). Not only did this help us to ensure that we were as accurate as possible (important when you’re placing your students’ grades in another teacher’s hands), but it allowed us to clarify how we might have explained things slightly differently in our individual classes. Again, this ensures fairness, and it was helpful to consider other ways we might have explained things (or clear up our own misunderstandings).

If you’re getting overwhelmed by the piles of paper surrounding your desk, pick one or two assignments that will mysteriously disappear. If you’re in this position, the odds are that you have plenty to grade, and everyone will survive if you leave a couple things out.

Based on experience, we don’t recommend “losing” an assignment students put a lot of time and effort into (because they’ll notice), though we have done it before—most notably when Kate dubbed a rhetorical analysis “the ungradable project.”

We tended to “lose” assignments that weren’t terribly important or that could be considered “prewriting” for a larger assignment, but every once in a while, an essay had to go, too, in which case, we think it’s perfectly legitimate to tell your students that when you looked at the three awaiting grades, you could “tell at a glance” it would be to students’ benefit if you left that one out.

This one takes a lot of self-discipline. Steph could whip through a stack of multiple-choice quizzes in a matter of minutes and a stack of credit/no credit packets in less than an hour. Naturally, this would always be her first choice when she had a few minutes of grading time.

But these were assignments that her student aide could grade, so it wasn’t a good use of time for her to do it. Those five minutes could have been spent getting one or two essays off the pile.

If, like Kate, you have a family willing to jump in at the end of the semester, these easy assignments can be handed off. Save your valuable time for the assignments that most need an experienced eye and delegate the rest.

When you’re evaluating the same criteria over and over again, it’s easy to get a clear idea of what, exactly, you’re looking for and quickly work your way through a stack of responses. Instead of grading each student’s entire assignment, grade everyone’s short-answer response to #10 and then everyone’s response to #12.

Instead of tackling a complicated project beginning to end, work through one element at a time on everyone’s project. Whenever Steph graded flip books, she would do everyone’s page 1, then everyone’s page 2, and so on. This saves you time because your brain isn’t switching back and forth between different ideas (and you’ll probably score more consistently).

If you start to find yourself typing the same comment over and over, save yourself some time and start building a comment bank. Some learning management systems have a function for this, or you can compile a Google Doc with comments you’d like to reuse.

It doesn’t even have to be this complicated, though. When we were grading responses on Actively Learn, we’d often write feedback to one student, and then copy it and use it as a template for everyone else’s. There were usually a few students for whom we had to start from scratch, but this saved us many precious minutes.

We’re going to be honest here: the main reason to do this is to trick yourself into thinking grading is fun. We love a good office supply, so the chance to use our favorite colored pens made grading more enjoyable than using a ballpoint pen. Does this seem silly and minimally helpful? Um, yes. But if it makes us one iota more willing to grade something, we will take it.

Why not red ones? Studies have found that too many marks in red pen tends to come across negatively toward students (I mean, we get it—no one wants to see their work bleeding).

This was a literal game changer for us. Despite our best effort to keep up with grading throughout the year, we had a history of getting behind and having a miserable couple weeks before finals as we attempted to get caught up.

Kate proposed a challenge for us one year: grade something for 20 minutes a day, and if we do it for a set period of time, we get a reward. The idea is that you can do anything for 20 minutes: it feels doable, but it’s still long enough to make real progress.

We each had our own rewards, and we had different “rules” about what assignments did or didn’t “count,” but we were pleasantly surprised to see that you can get a good amount done in 20 focused minutes. Most importantly, it gave us the momentum to just get started: many days we found ourselves grading a little bit longer, but even on days when we couldn’t bear more than 20 minutes, we still made some forward progress and those piles got just a little bit smaller.

While the 20-minutes-a-day plan had a huge impact, the end of the semester was still rough. We may have been a little bit behind, or we just had a lot of work coming in at the last minute that had to be turned around quickly.

Steph started creating a “daily quota” schedule for us: we had to grade, for example, 5 essays, 7 quizzes, 4 homework assignments, and so on, dividing each assignment evenly across the days remaining before our “due date.”

Not only did this give us a concrete pace to make sure we made it to the end, but sometimes you just can’t bring yourself to spend an hour or two grading the same assignment. Knowing we only had to grade five essays that day made it feel a lot more bearable, but again, we kept making progress toward our goal.

Grading time is always going to be a challenge, especially for English teachers. Even as we found ways to manage it better, we still despised it (as you can see by the multiple suggestions here that ultimately just “tricked” us into getting some work done). But it’s a necessary component of our jobs, and we know that timely and specific feedback does help our students learn. Intentional planning and a few psychological tricks can go a long way toward helping us keep up with this all-important task.

Looking for an easy-to-use rubric for grading homework assignments? Sign up for our Free Resource Library and gain access to that along with several other goodies. You’ll also be added to our weekly email list, where we send out encouragement and practical tips to get you through your teaching year. Interested in hearing us chat more about this topic? We’ve got both a podcast episode and a YouTube video where we chat about these strategies.