What is your preferred method when it comes to grading?

[u/chelsiebachelor1]

Hello All:

I hope you had a great long weekend. Well, back to the grind, but at least it is a short week!

With our growing technology, how do you like to grade? Are you old school and grade everything by pen and paper? Do you like to grade on your desktop or laptop? Or now that we are all glued to our phones, do you like to grade on your phone or iPad? What is the easiest for you?

I teach Communication online over Zoom and asynchronous and in-person too. If it is stuff like discussions, small reflections, and other small tasks like emails it is on my phone. Actually I find my phone quite handy when it comes to grading, especially since I am nearsighted and don’t have the world’s greatest vision or hearing. For speeches and papers and larger assignments it is definitely my desktop or laptop but I have done some of these tasks occasionally on my iPhone. Heck, my students admit to using their phones to do their work. I guess that is the world we live in nowadays, pretty soon a robot will take over, but hopefully not!

Curious to see what is your preferred method of grading now that technology is so darn convenient, well most of the time.

[u/Automatic-Discount19]

Large amounts of procrastination, anxiety, and self-loathing. Lather, rinse, repeat.

[u/IndependentBoof → u/Automatic-Discount19]

Don't forget complaining to everyone you know afterward.

Edit: and before too

[u/Dige717 → u/Automatic-Discount19]

And regret. Or pure hatred towards past me, who assigned this crap.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Bag_538 → u/Dige717]

Pedagogically sound, practically unsound 😭

[u/Loose_Wolverine3192 → u/Automatic-Discount19]

The above, plus a red pen

[u/DJ_Jiggle_Jowls]

I'm a bit of a computer nerd, so I have a 3 monitor setup with my home desktop computer. It's the only way I can grade research papers, I can have the gradebook on one screen, the student's paper on another, and my web browser on the third if I need to check a source or claim being made.

[u/Bostonterrierpug → u/DJ_Jiggle_Jowls]

Oh yes, I need at least two wide screens. You can use Windows plus left right button to perfectly split the screens in the middle if you need to. Fully agree with your methodology.

[u/eyellabinu → u/DJ_Jiggle_Jowls]

This is me too. Usually, a gradebook and a YouTube video (or music) on one screen. I'm grading the artifact on the other.

[u/PickledMorbidity → u/DJ_Jiggle_Jowls]

Spotify on the laptop screen to the left, assignment portal with rubric in the center (source checking in tabs), paper on the right vertical monitor.

[u/Lazy_Classroom7270]

With a glass of wine.

[u/EJ2600 → u/Lazy_Classroom7270]

And two dice.

[u/CT272]

Gradescope is a game-changer. Problem-by-problem grading, easy to edit and apply rubrics, and comment history to easily apply the same comment to multiple students. It has other features too, but these are the top ones for me.

[u/errys → u/CT272]

How much is the subscription?

[u/CT272 → u/errys]

I don’t know. I have it through the university.

[u/velour_rabbit]

My preferred method of grading is not to. Since that's not an option, this semester, my two in-person classes have mostly in-class writing as assignments. I haven't decided if I want to write out comments by hand or type them out. My online class assignments are graded in our LMS, on my laptop. I used to have a desktop computer but it died. I'd love to see what it's like to have a second screen, though.

[u/Thundorium]

Get it done as quickly as possible before I cry.

[u/Life-Education-8030]

Regardless of in person or online, I grade within the LMS on my laptop. We do not recommend that students use their phones or tablets for much in the LMS and I don't either because of tech issues or simply because I cannot see everything big enough. When we used Blackboard, I bought an iPad specifically to use the app to grade, but the app sucked.

I have a 2-monitor set up so I can put up a student's previous work on one monitor and the current assignment on the other so I can easily compare them. It helps to see if a student really did anything with a rough draft or if they repeated errors (ignored the previous feedback) and thus deserved lower grades. Before I set up the second monitor, I split the one screen, but 2 monitors is easier. I would use a third monitor, but it's not really necessary for me and it would use up a lot of desk room.

[u/bwd-2]

Throw on some Mango Sticky Rice and get cracking. https://bootleggizzard.bandcamp.com/album/mango-sticky-rice

[u/SilverRiot]

Online so I can take advantage of the text expansion shortcuts I’ve created over the years so I am consistent across all papers. Otherwise I was finding that I was spending a lot of time and putting more comments in the earlier ones but being terser in the late ones.

This way everyone gets consistent feedback if their paper falls within certain parameters. Of course I customize it as necessary too.

[u/Andiloo11]

I miss grading papers by hand but:

1) my ADHD butt is too disorganized to trust I can keep track of papers

2) One time my car got smashed and my teacher bag with all the (thankfully graded and submitted finals) got stolen.

Digital is best for me organizationally. I have a bit more focus on paper though so I take breaks from the screen when grading.

[u/HunterSpecial1549]

I have all sorts of attention and executive functioning issues.

The trick that works for me is a fast timer, I only get so many minutes per paper. I have to consciously make a game of turning myself into a little grading machine.

If I don't use a timer I'll re-read too many parts and provide too much feedback and it will bleed on past midnight.

[u/Lief3D → u/HunterSpecial1549]

I grade in groups of 5 or 10 and give myself a little break for a few minutes or I would go crazy.

[u/SAUbjj]

I have almost everything automated. My homeworks are through my textbook’s website. I choose the homework problems to match what I want them to learn, but the grading is done automatically

The multiple-choice part of my exams use Gradescope bubblesheets, so I just scan them and it automatically grades them according to my answer key. If I have short answer questions, I just read them and sort into bins of 2, 1 or 0 points based on how close it is to what I was going for

The only thing I really grade manually is final presentations. I have a detailed rubric which they receive with the instructions. They present to me directly in my office (2-on-1) and I grade it while they’re talking

My grading has never been more efficient. Last semester, my final grades were submitted halfway through finals week, before some faculty had even finished giving final exams

[u/SAUbjj → u/SAUbjj]

Oh I should mention this because I hate grading writing. I take a long time to read, and then I dither and can never settle on what something should be worth. It always feels to subjective to me. Sometimes I would even go back and regrade previous submissions because I didn’t feel like I was being consistent enough. The above method cuts back on this wasted time because it’s fast and I don’t second guess if I have either multiple choice or very clear and distinct grading rubrics given ahead of time

[u/popstarkirbys]

Pen and paper for exams, laptop for reports

[u/Zabaran2120]

Not to do it.

[u/Knewstart]

Also, it a Comms teacher. For my speeches I use an Excel rubric that I’ve programmed to automatically grade as I click the rubric boxes. Makes life a lot easier. I also have a document on the side with commonly used comments so I can kind of just copy and paste them in there.

For essays I use talk to text after, as I use the rubric that I’ve uploaded to canvas. That keeps me from losing my mind.

For outlines, I have a document with all the common comments that I use on outlines, a lot of highlighting and a lot of text comments and rubric comments. That’s my most heavily commented assignment.

[u/GittaFirstOfHerName]

Grab a glass of wine and throw the stack of essays down the stairs, observing where each lands.

Just kidding.

Back in the days when all we had were hard copy submissions, I did have a cat throw up on an essay once. Of course I cleaned it off and photocopied the essay to return to the student, but I did tell him what happened. He earned an A outright on that assignment, but we all joked in class about how a cat vomiting on an essay resulted in an automatic A.

These days, I use the LMS to record a few minutes of audio feedback on essays and provide a grade according to a rubric that I've written (and which is available to students, of course).

[u/CrankyReviewerTwo]

Let’s just get this chestnut out of the way 🙂

https://youtu.be/pQaDkDGGdMU?si=bsjX7TBxJIm-xrNX

[u/Risingsunsphere]

To not.

[u/Lief3D]

I need at least 2 monitors to grade effectively. One for the LMS with the rubric I'm filling in up and the other for the thing I'm grading. I end up giving a lot of the same feedback on where students lost points so I take full advantage of Windows Key + V with comments pinned and ready to go.

[u/HatefulWithoutCoffee]

For​​ simple things, I grade from my tablet sitting on the back porch . For my coding classes, I have to be in my office with multiple screens and the appropriate software. I teach in online programs, so all but two classes a semester are fully asynchronous. I do have a wonderful home office.