How I reduced my marking time from 4 hours a week to 15 minutes
Life's too short for assessment
Some readers of this esteemed publication may be aware that I have recently finished teaching an online course in creative writing. Although the weekly session lasted only for 60 minutes, the students — all 14 of them — insisted on submitting a piece of work after each class.
Every single week.
Reading each one, at a rate of ten minutes each, took nearly two and a half hours. Thinking of suitable comments, adding them in to the appropriate place in Google Classroom, and updating my spreadsheet markbook took another hour and a half.
Something had to be done.
I decided to create two comment banks, one consisting of praise, the other consisting of criticism. I then copied these into an Excel spreadsheet, inserted a formula to randomise them, and another formula to concatenate the two. All I then had to do was copy and paste the merged statements. No time spent reading. No time spent fretting over what feedback to provide. All was automated, and untouched by human hand.
As you can see, this works quite well. Take that first one:
Your transitions between scenes are smooth and seamless, making the narrative easy to follow. Try focusing on consistency in tone—some sections feel mismatched with the overall mood.
That sounds genuine, doesn’t it? It’s probably even useful, which is a bonus from the student’s point of view.
Very occasionally, someone would query a comment. For instance, one piece of feedback I provided on a six word story was:
Consider revising sections where exposition overwhelms action or dialogue.
Student: There aren’t any sections, only words, and how can there be too much exposition in just six words?
Me: The term “section” is used in advanced creative writing analysis to mean any appropriate unit of the narrative in question. In this case, each word is, in effect, a section. As for your second point, consider how you might change one or two words to make the narrative less obvious.
On another occasion, I wrote:
You’ve created a compelling protagonist with clear motivations and depth.
Student: I’ve written a prose poem about a bunch of flowers. There is no protagonist.
Me: In this case, the protagonist is implied. Perhaps it is you, the narrator. Or perhaps it is the bunch of flowers itself.
Student: Right. But a bunch of flowers can’t have any motivations, can it?
Me: You appear to have quite unconsciously hit upon the literary techniques of personification and anthropomorphism. I usually reserve these for my advanced courses, so well done.
Sometimes I think it’s a good idea to challenge people’s assumptions. For example, one student submitted a story that opened as follows:
As the auroral dawn unfolded its tapestry of sapphire and amethyst hues, the world awoke from its nocturnal slumber, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of night. The morning dew, a thousand tiny diamonds, sparkled upon the verdant grass, as the gentle breeze whispered secrets to the trees, their leaves rustling in a soft susurrus. Amidst this symphony of light and sound, a lone figure emerged, a vision of loveliness, her beauty a radiant sun that illuminated the landscape, casting a warm glow upon all it touched, like a benediction from the heavens themselves.
My feedback on that was:
Consider adding more detail to your descriptions to make the settings feel more vivid and real. Also, try grounding your setting with sensory details—what sights, sounds, or smells define it?
At the end of the course I had to say how much progress each student had made. Once again, I assigned random numbers to each person, representing progress as a percentage. This doesn’t really mean anything, but if questioned I would just say that I used a standard statistical technique. (According to a headline in the UK’s Daily Telegraph some years ago, 49% (that’s nearly half) of people don’t understand statistics, so I think I would be on safe ground.) I set the lowest number as 50, because anything lower than that might raise questions by the powers-that-be. No need to rattle the cage.
If you’re a teacher and you want to do this yourself, use the =randbetween(x,y) function, where x is the lowest number and y the highest. Do this in a column next to the one containing the pupils’ names, and there you have it:
If the numbers don’t look right, you can rectify the situation. For instance, in the spreadsheet shown above, Ava has a progress score of 94%. However, Ava turned up very occasionally, always late, and did no work whatsoever. In a case such as this, simply overwrite the number given, or refresh the scores by pressing the F9 key.
Automating my assessment process was one of the most creative things I’ve done this year, and my markbook has now entered into direct competition with my to-do list for my forthcoming “Fiction of the year” post.
Thank you for reading.
Terry
Postscript
If you’re not too sure whether or not to take this seriously, look at the date it was published. <Snigger>.
Competition reminder
Just to let you know, I extended the deadline for entering this dead easy competition, to win a copy of Gay Talese’s new collection of articles centred on New York, A Town Without Time. Deadline is Friday 4th April. Full details here:
Upcoming courses:
Creative writing using constraints
Good thing that I know that this is a joke.
Laughed out loud at "consider adding more detail..."