Efficient marking begins with designing your assessment. My main piece of advice for this would be to make a separate answer sheet where students can transfer their answers. If you plan to use multiple-choice, true or false, matching, or labeling questions, having all the answers on one sheet saves more time than you would think. If you are using a lot of these types of questions, you might also want to consider investing in ZipGrade ($6.99 a year) which prints bubble sheets that you can mark with your smartphone (like a scantron).

As for essay or long answer questions, my students do their writing on loose-leaf or on provided pages, but I add a rubric(s) to my answer sheet and label it “For Teacher Use,” and I complete all of the marking on that (see an example of a basic rubric below). This works really well because all of your grading is done on one page, and as a bonus, students can see the rubric criteria for each long question. Don’t forget to add mark values to the answer sheet for easy calculating at the end!

Fill in the blank to this phrase: “My biggest distraction when I am marking is _________”.  Turn this distraction is your motivation! For me, I would probably say eating or chatting with colleagues are my biggest distractions. Since marking ALL of your exams from start to finish is going to put you on a one-way street to crazy town, you need to use your distractions to your advantage. Once you know what you would rather be doing other than marking, schedule a specific amount of time for these things to keep your motivation alive.

Try one of the following:

• Grade for an hour – Take a 15-minute snack break
• Mark all questions 1 & 2 – Take a 15-minute break to go online
• Mark 10 essays – Take a 15-minute break to listen to music/relax

The most important part: stick to your time frame! If you know you will have trouble with this, set a timer on your phone/watch and make yourself accountable.

5. Take Any Help You Can Get

If you have educational assistants, teachers with no exams willing to help, or supply teachers in with no classes—take advantage! Ask them to help you with the “easy-to-mark” questions like multiple-choice, labeling, true and false, and matching. If you are lucky enough, you may even be able to enlist your husband/wife/roommate to assist you with marking these types of exam questions. There is nothing wrong with taking help where it is available!

If you found this helpful, you might want to read my post Allowing Students to Resubmit or Retest. 

You might also be interested in checking out this bundle of classroom management resources!