How to Speed Up the Essay-Grading Process, Minimize Subjectivity

As a high school English teacher, grading essays was one of the most important and grueling tasks of my job. After some trial and error and many days spent "slogging" through piles of essays, I began to use an objective-based grading rubric for grading essays that really cut down on grading time and also helped to minimize the subjectivity of the grading process.

The type of rubric I used is nothing revolutionary, but it is very, very helpful. Primarily, the virtues of the grading system boil down to clarity for both the teacher and the student.

Focus on Structure

This grading rubric focuses on paragraphs as "grading units", so that you will assign a grade (or score) to each paragraph. As a result, the essay assignment will count paragraphs and not pages.

Though the idea of a paragraph count for an essay may sound silly, arbitrary and even prudish, we need only point out that the same is true if you assign a certain number of pages for the essay.

The essay can be a five, seven, or eleven paragraph assignment, or whatever you like. (When double spacing a paragraph will take up about half of a page.)

Grading Each Paragraph

There are two basic types of paragraphs in any essay assignment: intro/conclusion and body paragraphs.

In this rubric we will assign 3 points to the thesis or introductory paragraph. A clearly stated thesis that communicates an argument receives 3 points¹. A thesis that communicates an argument but is unclear gets 2 points. And a thesis that does not communicate an argument gets 1 point.

The body paragraphs will be worth 3 points each. One point is given for a clear topic sentence, another for the presence of supporting ideas or evidence, and a final point for analysis of that evidence. If any of these are absent or inadequate the corresponding point is deducted.

The concluding paragraph will be worth 2 points receiving full credit if the thesis is restated in light of the argument that has been made in the essay. One point is given if the conclusion is there but fails to connect the points of the essay adequately.

Additional Scoring Categories

If you follow the point system outlined above, you can grade a three page essay in five minutes while providing a somewhat detailed assessment of the student's work regarding the structure of the essay.

Five minutes seems brief, I know. You may think that spending only five minutes on grading an essay that took days to write is disrespecting or short-changing the student. I argue that this is not the case.²

Ultimately, we would like to move the students on to better ideas, but structure comes first. Using an objective-driven rubric like this one for grading essays allows you as a teacher to communicate the importance of structure, to grade that structure, and gives you a clear marking system that does not rely on subjectivity.

To reinforce the importance of thinking well, beyond writing a well structured essay, you can create additional scoring categories for the rubric. These will add to your grading time, but can serve to strengthen the relationship between good writing and good thinking.

Additional scoring categories will depend on the level of students you are working with. Grammar, adherence to the assignment, and "overall quality" are all possible scoring categories.

In high school you will probably want to have a grammar category. I started the school year allowing five grammar mistakes in an essay. If the student made fewer than five mistakes, he or she received full points in the grammar category. If the student made more than the allowable five, he or she got zero points for that category. As the year progressed, fewer mistakes were allowed.

Self-Grading & Peer Assessment

Another really nice thing about using a cut-and-dry objective-driven rubric like this is that students can grade each other's essays in a rough draft form.

You can set a due date for rough drafts and set aside twenty minutes or forty minutes where students will have their essays read by classmates once or twice or even three times. Ask the students to apply the rubric, just as you will, assessing the introduction, body paragraphs and conclusion using the point system that you will use.

Not only does this help students to internalize the idea of the essay structure that you are teaching, it also helps to objectify the scoring, showing students that their grade is entirely determined by the work on the page, not the teacher's whims.

Rubric & Assignment Prompt

When using a rubric like this one, which will shorten the grading process, it is important to write a good prompt and to be sure the assignment will yield a thoughtful, well-structured essay.

Ideally, you will be able to grade a three page essay in five minutes while assessing a student's depth and accuracy of thought regarding a text, a topic, or a problem. This will only be true, however, if the prompt demands that a student engage in synthesis, comparison, or "high-level" analysis.

I've never been big on the buzz words, so we may throw those terms out the window but we must keep the central idea of study and instruction in mind. We cannot throw away the idea that we teach essays, not so that students learn to write coherent sentences, but so that students learn to think analytically, read analytically, and truly engage in the world of ideas.

¹ All thesis statements should communicate an argument. If the thesis is as simple as "The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot is a very long poem," there is an argument in it, a point to be proven. This is in contrast to a non-thesis like "The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot uses a symbolism." The latter statement is a fact, not an argument.

² The teaching comes in communicating the ideas, the terminology, and the analysis that goes into the essay. When you assess the body paragraphs as to the presence or absence of evidence and analysis, you are checking to see if the student has learned what you have been teaching. It doesn't have to take you an hour to see this, not if you've got a good idea of what evidence and analysis look like, which you do. That's what you're teaching, right?

(Maybe five minutes really is too brief. This system might still have you grading one essay for ten minutes, but it will be a far shorter process than what results from grading without a rubric of this kind.)