Reviewing students’ work is demanding. Between managing large cohorts, meeting tight deadlines, and working with limited support, maintaining a fair, high-quality assessment process while providing meaningful feedback can feel like a formidable challenge. How do you stay efficient, uphold crucial standards like validity, reliability, and transparency, and still genuinely support student learning? Here are some practical considerations and tips to help you optimize your assessment approach here at the UT by our testing & assessment expert at CELT.
Rethinking Your Assessment Set-up
Before diving into grading, it pays to look at the big picture. Your intended learning outcomes (ILOs) are the guiding principle and starting point for your assessment strategy: but it might be time to take another look at them. Are they all still relevant? Are some of the ILOs already being assessed in another course?
If your course features several different assessments, consider stepping back and mapping each method against your ILOs. From there, you can explore a few structural tweaks:
- Consider combining or omitting assessments to see whether one task can cover both theory and application, for example, by asking students to justify their practical choices using specific theoretical concepts.
- Evaluate whether all assessments need a formal grade, as you might save a significant amount of time by assessing certain components simply as ‘complete’ or ‘pass/fail’.
- Try using fewer, more comprehensive final assessments while supporting students with formative practice along the way. Providing exercises and guidance, like a mid-course Canvas quiz with automated feedback and unlimited retakes, helps them prepare without adding to your grading pile.
- Explore whether a different format or medium would be more efficient. Sometimes oral exams seem time-consuming but ultimately take less time than grading written exams for a large group. Take a look at Oral Exams and Alternative assessments. Alternatively, consider video submissions, advice memos instead of full reports, posters, or digital exams.
- Reduce the final product to what is strictly essential, meaning perhaps students only need to deliver the methodology section of a research report, or use a highly structured, easy-to-grade fill-in form.
- Swap individual assignments for group work to limit the number of deliverables, can be efficient but there are some considerations. The project should be suitable and challenging enough for a group. There should be measures to ensure that everyone will contribute (no freeriding) and learn sufficiently. Also, be sure to check your programme’s assessment policy regarding group work. For more information, see Group work.
Efficiency Tips for Written Exams
When it comes to written exams, ensuring that students are well-prepared is paramount. A well-prepared cohort increases the likelihood of students passing on their first attempt, drastically reducing the number of time-consuming re-sits.
To make the grading process itself smoother:
- Use a digital system for test-taking to make reviewing work much easier, bypassing the headache of deciphering handwriting and allowing you to easily divide questions among assessors or grade question-by-question to stay focused and consistent.
- Develop clear answer models with specific sub-points for partially correct answers to keep your grading focused, consistent, and reliable if multiple teachers are assessing.
- Provide clear prompts and standardized formats for students to write their answers if you are testing on paper.
- Use multiple choice questions, when possible, even if just for a portion of the exam, as they can be expertly designed to assess higher-order thinking. For tips on this, see the handout Higher order MC questions, and for broader strategies, check out Grading written tests efficiently.
Optimizing Assignment Assessment
For essays, reports, and projects, preparation is the ultimate time-saver. If you prepare students well from the start, you will spend far less time providing interim feedback, offering extra support, and reviewing "repair" assignments.
Expectation management and transparency are key. Be strict about requirements like deadlines, word counts, and formatting, and discuss the rubric or criteria openly. If possible, show examples of past deliverables and let students use the criteria to judge that sample work.
Tip for writing criteria: Try using this sentence starter to communicate criteria in easy-to-follow language: "We assess the degree to which the product is..." or "Whether you are able to [action] that is [qualifier]." (e.g., Whether you are able to write an abstract that is concise, easy to read, inviting, and gives a good representation of your research findings.)
Providing intermediate feedback ensures better end products, but it doesn't have to consume all your time. Try these strategies to lighten the load:
- Encourage self-assessment or proofreading by providing a checklist and asking students to submit feedback points based on their own review, which reduces redundant feedback and encourages student ownership.
- Guide peer feedback with a focus on actionable improvements using a checklist or a single-point rubric based on your criteria. Doing this in class allows you to address questions and unclarities on the spot.
- Provide generic feedback on common mistakes to the whole class. This can also be done by way of a short video or audio recording, or in a memo. You can also create a phased process: generic feedback on a first draft, followed by peer-assessment, and reserving your direct tutor-assessment for the final phase.
- Create a common comments bank or a coding system for frequent errors (e.g., "R = reference is missing") so you can explain the issue once in a code-list and point students directly to guidelines or sources. For other practical suggestions, have a look at the Assignments-feedback-impact-efficiency-checklist.
Support and More Tips
Remember, you don't have to figure this out alone. The best tips often come from your colleagues, so make sure to share ideas and ask what works for them.
You can always ask our CELT faculty advisors to think along with you! Additionally, check out these resources on the Learning & Teaching Portal:
