Grading papers does not need to take over your life. In fact, you should NEVER bring work home to grade! Here are some ways to grade and grading options for chemistry assignments to save you time grading.
Never Bring Work Home
Two reasons you should never bring work home. First, they don’t pay you for that. And second, your dog might eat it. Yes – my dog ate the vocabulary flash cards that one of my students wrote and I took home to grade. I know what you’re asking. Yes! It was super embarrassing…
So What do I do?
Well if you can’t bring work home, how do you get it graded in a reasonable amount of time? Great question! I’m no expert, but I will say that after that first year, I never brought work home to grade EVER. I only stayed late at school a handful of days in order each year and most of that wasn’t even spent grading!
Make Specific Plans to Grade
Find the spaces in your schedule. I know that seems tough because there’s never any time, but I promise you there is time.
When I had “bathroom duty” and had to sit in the hallway monitoring how many students were in the bathroom (insert eye roll here), I’d grade at the student desk in the hall. I just carried my turn in bin with me to the duty post. Back to school night, award nights and the nights I had sports duty, I’d make sure to NOT GRADE anything leading up to that time. Then the space between the end of the school day and the start of the event, I’d lock myself in my room and get to grading! No friends or coworkers allowed to chat!
One of my school years, my prep period changed times each day. When I had the afternoon prep period, I didn’t have much brain power left for planning my chemistry lessons so I’d grade. At that point, I pretty much had all my answer keys, so grading was more of a “yes it’s right,” “no it’s wrong,” or something in the middle for partial credit. (Morning preps were for lesson plan and test writing.) Try to work with your own energy levels to figure when is the best grading time for you. For you, this might be a day of the week, instead of a time of day.
Grade for Completion
This is one of the easiest grading options for chemistry classes. I wouldn’t do this often, because it will load your gradebook full of A’s that maybe would have been C’s otherwise. For group work, homework, simple practice and unit review, this is not a bad idea. I’d also make this assignment worth very few points so it doesn’t overtake the class grade.
Grade at Your Desk
I do this specifically for vocabulary assignments. My students are given a list of terms that they must search our glossary for and hand write the definitions in their notebooks. This is basically graded for completion (I only check a few specific definitions. At the start of class, I sit at my desk and the students bring their notebooks to me. Then I immediately put the grade in my book. I don’t circle the room, take down names and do it later. I put the grades in, right then and there! Boom the whole assignment is done in mere minutes! I do this with the 15 vocabulary assignments for the year, but I’m sure you can find other ways to use this grading option in your chemistry class.
Partial Grade
This is my typical way of grading – especially classwork. Let’s say you have a 10 question assignment- 3 easy, 4 medium and 3 hard questions in numerical order. You want the assignment to be 20 points. Give the first 10 points for turning in the completed assignment on time. Then you can divide the remaining 10 points across three questions of your choosing. For example, question 2, an easy question may be worth 2 points. Question 5, a medium question may be worth 3 points, and finally question 9, a hard question may be worth the remaining 5 points. You can structure this however works best for you, your students and the specific assignment.
How does it save you time? Instead of grading all 10 questions, you’ll just grade 3. Students shouldn’t know which of the three you’re grading. This gives them the best opportunity to showcase their learning. You may also choose to do partial credit. For example, if question 9 (the hard question you graded) turns out to be the wrong answer, maybe you look to question 10 to get some points for that student. Plus you can take a look at another hard question to see if the student was successful in those tougher questions.
Self or Peer Assess
This is one of my favorite grading options for chemistry because it saves the maximum amount of time! It’s also great for self assessment and having students understand common mistakes to avoid! All you need is a box of red pens (or pencils) and an answer key.
When students are done with a quiz or classwork, you make an announcement that they should swap papers with a student nearby. Then you read out the answers to the worksheet. You could also project them on your board. Students use the red pens to grade the assignment. They put the final grade on top. Then all you need to do is drop those grades into your gradebook.
Use Technology
I know – not what you wanted to hear (especially after pandemic teaching…) While the ever famous scantron machine will grade for you, it doesn’t do as much as I wish it did. Plus it requires students to have pencils and you have to make a plan to get to the grading machine… I prefer to use a grading app that uses the camera of a phone (or iPad). It’s called ZipGrade. This app does have a cost to it, but it’s a one time cost for your whole school year. It does quite a bit of item analysis and will give you a better look at data from the specific test. There is also a feature where you can track individual student data, but truthfully I never used that. Instead I use my test score tracker. You can get that for free here!
There’s of course, all things Google classroom. Google Forms is one of the best options for self grading. I’m sure you know this by now, so I won’t go on and on about it.
Be the Teacher
Students love to help you! I’ve had plenty of students help me with grading! It really doesn’t even matter what the subject is, so long as you have a solid answer key. My physical science students have graded plenty of chemistry quizzes for me. Here’s some grading options for “be the teacher.”
- Give an early finisher a stack of assignments and the answer key
- Ask the whole class to take three minutes to do a “Self or Peer Assess” for a class different from theirs – great for the last five minutes of class that you have nothing to do.
- Have students help you during lunch, after school or while “punished”
- Use a sticky note to cover a name on a quiz or assignment. During a tutoring session, use the assignment to teach a student. You and the student can grade it at the same time.
- Use this when you cover a class! Especially if that teacher didn’t leave plans and you’re expected to keep a classroom full of kids busy. (Works even better if this class is NOT your subject matter)
Make More Time for Grading
When your lessons are planned and that area of your teaching life is easy, you can have more time for grading. Sometimes you just need to buckle down and grade stuff. I get it. Check out my free chemistry curriculum outline to start you off on the right foot! It will outline units and lessons so you can jump into a quick lesson planning session, get it over with and move on to grading.
