© American Society for Engineering Education, 2006 Efficient and Effective Grading of Student Work

As new engineering educators, we are faced with countless responsibilities that compete for our valuable time. Grading student work is one of these new tasks that we all have to undertake. While grading is often a tedious and time consuming task, it is important for students to receive a fair assessment of their work accompanied by constructive feedback. Like many aspects of engineering, grading can be thought of as an optimization problem: maximize student learning while minimizing the grading time. In this paper, we provide advice for new faculty on how to improve grading efficiency without sacrificing its effectiveness; in other words “how to save time while grading”. Tips are presented for different types of student work found in engineering courses. For each type of graded activity, we encourage the faculty member to think about grading before handing it out to students. Poorly designed questions or assignments can lead to unnecessarily long and difficult grading. We also suggest methods that reduce the time spent on grading student work but still accurately assess the students ’ progress. Overall, the techniques presented in this paper are designed to help to make the grading process more efficient while remaining constructive and fair to the students