Research shows students can only take in a limited amount of feedback on their work. Give just a few key comments to students and focus them on the learning objectives of the assignment. Make sure the feedback you give is something that students can use to improve for later assignments in your course.

Before starting to grade, look over a few randomly chosen examples of student submissions. This will help you understand common errors you’ll see.

When your assignment can easily be broken into separate pieces (short answers, individual problems, etc.), grade one question for everyone before moving on to the next question. It is easier to remember the answer and your scoring rules for one question at a time than it is to remember the entire assignment’s answers and scoring.

Grading question-by-question also improves consistency in scoring across student work as less time passes between grading individual questions for your first and last student. Use this method for grading exams with a teaching team—assign each team member specific questions to grade for all students, rather than having each member grade the entire exam for different subsets of students.

Rubrics can help you grade efficiently by building a framework to guide your workflow, setting up a structure for your feedback, and can act as pre-written comments for students. In creating a rubric, you shift some of your grading time to before the assignment is due, hopefully reducing overall grading time. It's generally recommended to develop a rubric before an assignment is due, but rubrics are still excellent tools for helping you grade even if that goal isn't achieved.

Rubrics also help promote consistency across multiple graders and provide useful guidance for students as they complete their assignments. Learn more about using rubrics on our rubric design page.

Unless they make a response unclear or limit understanding, don't worry about grammar (or small arithmetic errors). If they do impact understanding, you can still apply a penalty as needed. 

If teaching grammar or basic math aren't part of your learning objectives, why spend the time grading for it? 

When you come across a grammar/calculation error, mark it with a circle, underline, highlighting, etc. Don't comment on what the error is or how to fix it. You could even just mark the line that the error happens on. 

Giving space for students to identify and fix their errors encourages growth as critical evaluators of their own work.

The first time you come across a new grammar/calculation error, mark it and comment on it by briefing noting what the error was and explaining how to correct it. If that error is repeated again later in the student's work, only mark it. 

Try using one of the quick-commenting methods below to expedite this process too.

If you need to give more careful grammar or math help, focus on just the first page of an assignment, the first couple of paragraphs, or the first calculation to give detailed comments (Johnson, 2006). 

As you grade more work later in the term, you can reduce your feedback on grammar/calculations to a less detailed method as students improve.

Set aside specific time in your week to focus on grading. 

Aim for times that might motivate you. Does grading early in the morning over a few cups of coffee sound like a gentle kick off your day? Will a mid-afternoon grading-break from writing a book or dissertation chapter help reset your focus? After you put your kids to bed at night, would some quiet grading ease you into a calm evening?

Avoid choosing times that could impact your workflow. Giving yourself only the two hours immediately before class to grade might hurt the quality of your feedback for students at the bottom of the pile as class gets closer. Grading half of student work after class on Wednesday, but then setting it aside until the next Monday, might slow your progress if you need to review previously graded work to recall how you've been grading.

Set a timer and quickly wrap up feedback for one student's submission when it goes off. This works best for longer assignments, rather than setting a timer for every minute or two while grading a short answer response.

If needed, you can adjust the time limit after grading a few assignments.

In one sitting, set a goal to grade a quarter of student essays, a third of student's architecture projects, one question for every student, etc. After hitting your goal, take a break or set aside grading to work on another responsibility. 

Setting both a time limit and grading goal also determines how long you will spend grading that portion of the work. If you want to grade 10 (of 30) student essays and allot 15 minutes for each essay, you need two-and-a-half hours to grade. You might want to set aside three hours of your day to ensure you complete your goal.

Stretch. Have a two-song dance party. Go on a walk. Take selfies with a pet. Eat a snack. Whatever helps you decompress.

Copy and paste comments you think you might use again into a Word Doc. When you want to make that comment again for a different student, it’s already written for you—just copy it into that student’s work!

You can even include notes on scoring penalties for each comment to help keep your grading consistent. If you grade 70 other student responses before a second student misidentifies the Civil War battle that Joseph Mansfield died in, will you remember that you took off two points (instead of one) the first time a student made that mistake? If your comment bank says "Gen. Mansfield was killed at Antietam -2" you will!

Canvas's SpeedGrader has a Comment Library that can store and let you automatically reuse comments directly in the SpeedGrader. Click the blue speech bubble above the Assignment Comments box (see image on the right) to either add new comments or to reuse existing comments.  For more information, visit our How-To-Guide on Canvas assignments and SpeedGrader.

Do note that each course has one Comment Library that gets shared between all assignments and all graders. When you create a comment for one assignment, it will be listed in the library for all other assignments in your course. Relying on the Comment Library exclusively to store comments could become unwieldy after just a couple of assignments.

Rather than writing the same comment repeatedly, add comments you think you might reuse in a Word Doc and assign them a number or short code phrase. Write (or type) just the number or phrase on student work and share your Word Doc with students to decode your feedback. As you must share this "code book" with students, this method has the added benefits of summarizing feedback for the class, as discussed below. 

For example, writing “C15” near text you’ve marked could direct students to a comment that says “C15: This doesn’t feel related to topic. Clarify and strengthen their relationship.” 

In this example, the student is given useful feedback, but with minimal writing by the grader. Each time a student's writing wanders off path, you can redirect them quickly by just writing "C15". You could also give a little more context for the comment and use a phrase instead of a number; for example, use the code "tangent" instead of "C15". 

If just using numbers, it may be useful to include something other than just a number (e.g. "C15" or "com15" rather than just "15") so that students don't mistake the number for a score.

If you are leading a teaching team, you could develop at least part of a coding system before grading and share it with your teaching team. This helps introduce your team to an assignment's learning objectives, your expectations for quality of student work, and your grading expectations of them. Once the team starts using your coding system, they should have freedom to add new comments as needed (which hopefully align with the expectations you've outlined and guidance you've given them). You could even create the coding system alongside your team to give a deeper understanding learning objectives for the assignment and to further develop their skills in analyzing student work.

Double-digit comment coding uses two numbers (for example, 3-2) as a comment code. When used with a rubric, the first digit refers to one rubric criterion and the second to a specific comment. 

For example, code “3-2” tells the student to look at criterion three’s second comment for their feedback. 

These comments are different from the descriptions already in the rubric. Instead, they help explain why students earned a specific rating for that criterion or offer suggestions of how to move up to a higher rating.

A variation of this uses three-digit comment coding, adding a middle digit (3-1-2) that references the rating level for the criteria (Gonzalez, 2014). Code "3-1-2" says to the student that for rubric criteria 3, their rating level is 1, and they should look at comment 2 for that rating level to find your reasoning or suggestions for improvement. 

When there are common mistakes by many students, discuss them in class or share a document or video in Canvas about common mistakes and how to fix or avoid them. This will help familiarize students with common errors and ways to improve their work, even if they didn’t make the specific errors this time. 

If you use a rubric, comment bank, or comment coding, use tally marks to track how many times you used each item and help find trends in student work. This can also highlight places where students are struggling, so that you can provide more support for students later in the term or tweak your materials to better support future students before the assignment.

You could probably go on and on about ways to help students grow in their work. Instead of writing it all out, invite them to chat during office hours. This doesn’t have to be exclusively used for poor work, and students should know that when you invite them. Your invitation is not about yelling at them, but engaging with them authentically to chat about how to improve their work. Talking with students allows them to ask questions in the moment to better understand your feedback. When multiple courses of action are possible, you can brainstorm together about what a student could do and help them make a decision for themselves about how to proceed.

In Canvas's SpeedGrader, you can record audio or video feedback with the camera icon below the Assignment Comments box (see image on the right). Use it for quicker whole assignment feedback, instead of using it for a line-by-line critique.

For more information on SpeedGrader, visit our How-To-Guide on Canvas assignments and SpeedGrader.