Purpose: To help faculty work more efficiently without sacrificing the quality of the feedback to students. These tips are effective for any classroom subject, particularly those that use essay or short answer exam questions.
- Develop a standard comment sheet to distribute to all students in a particular course. Instead of writing comments on the students’ individual papers, write them on your computer as composite feedback. This approach is far quicker, and you can turn frequently made comments into a boilerplate response.
- Give advice on how to solve or correct commonly missed points or problems
- Provide brief examples from anonymous student papers to illustrate the best responses
- List important feedback about your grading process, such as how you determined partial credit
- You can also provide quick individual feedback.
- Attach a sheet of paper, if necessary, containing some brief individual comments
- Provide checkmarks or brief symbols on the actual paper to indicate errors that students can correct themselves to regain some of their lost points
- Remember to use your timer as you grade!
Adapted from The Teaching & Learning Center, The University of Texas at San Antonio (www.utsa.edu/tlc), Millis, Barbara