Grading Hacks to Keep Your Momentum Going

Originally published April 24, 2026

Keeping Your Grading Momentum Going

There is an old saying in university faculty teaching circles that goes something along the lines of: “They pay me for grading, the rest of the job I would do for free.” Right now, instructors across Laurier are finalizing their end-of-term grades, and perhaps also reflecting on how the task of grading could be made more efficient, effective and less tedious. While grading provides instructors with the opportunity to assess their students, provide meaningful feedback to set them up for future success, and (critically) give us those “ah-ha!” moments when we see evidence of student learning, it can also be difficult and laborious.

Whether you’re still working through final papers or have the last few grades in sight, here are a few tips and strategies for grading that can save time. Some might be employed now, others integrated into your future teaching practice.

Grading Rubrics Save Time!

Grading rubrics are a proven tool that help make the evaluation process more consistent, measurable, and clearer for students, while also reducing grading time. Rubrics focus instructor feedback on the most important learning objectives rather than every minor error, while eliminating the need to provide very similar comments across large numbers of assignments. They can even be colour-coded to reduce the need for detailed comments.

Rubrics can streamline grading if there are clearly defined thresholds between levels. Megan Faherty advises instructors to “avoid modifiers like rarely, sometimes, or mostly to define the levels, as “these are still subjective and open to interpretation.” Instead, build in “objective thresholds”, such as correctly analyzing 3 of the 5 documents (2021).

TEI’s rubric design resource provides curated rubric tools and templates to guide your rubric development and implementation. You can also reach out to an Educational Developer at TEI for more hands-on guidance. And did you know that TEI offers a rubric design workshop every year?

A Fun, Engaging Twist on Rubric Development: Try developing the grading rubric along with your students during the first weeks of term via class exercises. Not only does this provide students with a sense of agency over their learning and clarify assignment expectations, but it will also reduce the questions coming from students afterward.

Grade Efficiently to Reduce Fatigue

It’s important to streamline your grading process and balance effective feedback with your time (and keyboard capacity). A few suggestions for reducing repetition and fatigue while grading:

Canned Feedback: Create a document of comments for common errors to save time, cutting and pasting into feedback boxes. Maintain a feedback library.
Using Comment Coding: Relatedly, you can assign the common comments in the Word Doc a number or short code phrase, then just need to write (or type) the number or phrase on student work. Afterwards both the "code book" and summarized class feedback can be shared with students.
Use Audio/Video Feedback: For online submissions, recording audio or video feedback can be faster than typing out detailed notes.

Shake Up Your Grading Rhythm

So much about grading is psychology – do you start with the papers you think will be good, to motivate yourself? Or start with the tough ones? When (and how often) should you take breaks? Here are some grading strategies that can help incentivize forward momentum with grading:

1-2-3-4-5 Technique: When you have a large number of longer-form assignments to grade, Elizabeth Wells advises starting with just one item, then taking a very short break. Then do two items, then take a break, and so on, working up to five assignments or essays in a row. Then start working back down again until you get to one, after which you can take a much longer break. Wells notes, “As you build up to five, it will be a bit more challenging, but you have all that productivity behind you. On the ‘way down’ back to one, you can tell yourself, ‘I only have to do X more of these’ until you get back to doing just one.”
Pomodoro Technique: Pioneered by Frances Cirillo in the 1980s, instructors set a timer for 30-minute sessions, grading for 25 minutes, taking 5 minutes off to do something enjoyable, grading for another 25 minutes, taking 5 minutes off, etc.
Grade Question-by-Question: This technique asks you to break down the assignment to be graded into separate pieces (individual questions or section) and grade each piece across the whole class. This will give you a good sense of the overall understanding of the content, allow you to see similar patterns, and improve consistency in your grading. This technique can be scaled up if you are working with grading supports (TA, IA, etc.) by assigning one person to grade each question or section of an assignment.

Notes for Next Time…

When your grading is done for this term, it is worth reflecting and making notes on how to approach grading in future courses. Jot down what worked and what were the most challenging aspects of grading. This might be a good time to consider big picture grading questions like:

Does everything need to be graded? sometimes we give students small assignments in a course that are really intended to encourage them to learn and practice skills, or to engage in reflection with their group members. Ask yourself: Do these need to be graded? Perhaps formative feedback from students on the exercise is enough to let the instructor know whether learning is occurring.
What grading tempo do course deadlines create? Are there grading bottlenecks or stress points that can be alleviated? Perhaps pacing the grading out over the term (with different groups of students delivering products on sequential dates), rather than having an assignment that is due for everyone on the same day. Scaffolding assignments can also achieve this.
Are you ready for a bigger change in your approach to assessment? Consider alternative grading approaches like contract grading, ungrading or specifications grading which take very different approaches to grading for both you and your students.