I like marking and, you know what, I suspect you do too. Put differently, I think there are far more faculty who like marking than we might otherwise believe. That is counterintuitive. Complaints about marking far outweigh affirmative comments. I get that. Marking is frustrating because of its sheer volume. Depending on the type of assignment, it can be repetitive and, as a result, not a little boring. Marking interrupts other work (say, research and writing). It is frustrating to read work where constructive feedback has been ignored or sloppy essays that look like they were cobbled together at the last minute. It’s disappointing to read poor exams that don’t show much evidence of learning, and this can make at least some of us wonder about our effectiveness as instructors. What seems like a rise in cheating with the increased use of Generative AI is an on-going concern.[1]
If these frustrations define your experience, my goal is not necessarily to change your mind. What I’d like to do instead is to look at marking from a different direction to hopefully generate another kind of discourse around it. Instead of asking what faculty don’t like about marking, I want to flip that question and ask about its positive elements.
This kind of discussion strikes me as important because we live in a different pedagogical age. Generative AI is part of that, but so too is the expansion of scholarship of teaching and learning, the growth of teaching and learning centres, and the shifting modalities of course delivery. The fact of the matter is that we simply know more about marking than we used to and we are often called upon to mark in ways that are different than in the past. We know, for instance, more about the ways in which feedback and assignment design can affect students from different backgrounds, how to better interact with students in online courses, the importance of retrieval to learning – or, what is called “the testing effect” – the pros and cons of “ungrading,” and why students do cheat, among other things.
I like marking for several reasons. On the simplest level, I like it because it structures my semester. Marking is something like the passing of the seasons. Different kinds of marking take place at different times of the semester. These shifts allow me to chart the progress of courses, mark their development against student learning, think about what and how students are learning, and develop an ongoing conversation that evolves with different kinds of assignments. For example, I can have a different kind of conversation about an annotated bibliography than a thesis statement than a draft final paper.
I also like reading what students write. One of the most interesting things for me is that the submissions I receive, say, on exams are not repetitive and boring. Why is this? I honestly don’t know. Some specific approaches to exam design could affect how questions are answered. One could vary the questions, provide choice, or have students design their own questions (I often have this as an option) and all of this would make for more varied submissions. For me, a key part of the work I receive is that it is often written by students who like the topics or find them challenging and want to talk about them. I also talk to my classes directly about developing their own interpretations. Before exams, I explain that I am interested in what they think, their interpretations, the narratives they will tell. I’m going to guess that most faculty do the same thing. I already know, I say, what I think. What I’d like to read is what they think. Not all students pick up on this, but enough do to make the discussion and the marking worthwhile.
I also like the excitement students bring to their work. Excitement can be palpable in oral presentations; it might not be as evident in a paper or book review or some other written submission, but marking doesn’t take place in isolation. Written work is often submitted only at the end of a long process that can include scaffolded assignments, visits during office hours, and in-class workshopping. Recently, during presentations in a third-year course, two different students spoke directly about their own excitement with their projects, how much they enjoyed what they were researching, and how it challenged the perspectives with which they began their work. Even if their presentations had been weak (and, they were not), that kind of enthusiasm made marking them both fun and easy.
Does this work as easily in a large class as a smaller one? Part of the answer to that depends on resources faculty have available to them. A colleague of mine used teaching assistants to facilitate group discussions in a large class and then had another TA create notes on-the-fly that were posted to the learning management system when he followed up small group discussions with a class brainstorming. I’d be lying, however, if I said that class size made no difference, but one approach we have taken is to team teach courses. This allows us to break up a large class into smaller discussion groups that meet weekly. We cut down on lectures to make the time. This might not work at your institution, and it involves a specific allocation of teaching time that may not be possible for every department. But I’d encourage you to give it a try even if you lose some course coverage.
When I asked colleagues about their own marking experiences, what I discovered were analogous perspectives. My sample was highly selective and so pretty far from scientific, but it did include faculty at a number of different institutions and people at different career stages. Not everyone agreed with me, but everyone found aspects of marking that they liked. A common theme was surprises. These took different forms: students whose work effort really showed a development over time, either within a course or over several years, or particularly insightful submissions that showed a real engagement with the subject matter. One colleague said they liked watching students progress on their own intellectual journeys and another linked development to student maturity, both in terms of their work or seeing them think about their futures after university. Other colleagues were drawn to the chance to provide feedback, and one noted that they preferred assignments that opened up the possibility of significant constructive criticism.[2] In the same line, another said that it afforded the chance to identify struggling students for more detailed interventions.
What could make marking better? I am sure there are a fair number of answers to this question but two stand out to me. The first thing that makes marking better for me is talking to students about their own sense of what makes for good work. At different points in the semester, I take a few minutes – usually about five but not more than ten – to ask my classes what they think constitutes a good essay or presentation or free write. What surprises me is how closely their views align with mine. In other words, they create almost the same criteria I do to evaluate an assignment. For me, this exercise has the effect of developing clear criteria but also a sense of collectivity in a course. It gives students a voice in their own education and hence some matter of agency, but it also highlights areas of responsibility. We have all agreed, as it were, on what we are striving to do.
Making marking a more visible aspect of our work would also help, but this might be more difficult. In discussing marking with colleagues, one told me that marking constituted a significant percentage of their overall labour. I believe this. By increasing the visibility of marking as part of academic labour, we better acknowledge the work instructors are doing, its difficulties, and its positive features. We can also take a better account of the work of precarious labour. One problem we might have is that time spent on marking is often disguised because it takes place at “non-work” times, in the evenings or on weekends. If we make this work more visible, we simultaneously make it more serious and that, I think, benefits everyone.
Andrew Nurse
Mount Allison University
[1] Whether or not this is true will remain to be seen. There are a fair number of graphic headlines highlighting what is presented as academic dishonesty but whether AI has fundamentally altered student behaviour is, at this point, far from clear. For one headline, see this story.
[2] Class size is, again, an important consideration and I don’t want to dismiss this concern. It goes to the heart of how the contemporary academy allocates resources. I don’t want to be that person who comes along and tells people that they can do more with less. For my classes, both large and small, I provide collective feedback and link it to a discussion of student perspectives. I explain that collective feedback is collective. It might or might not apply to any one student. It also provides an opportunity for students to discuss their own sense of their strengths and weaknesses.