5 Tips for Grading Essays Faster

I think any ELA teacher can agree that the worst part of the job is grading essays. 🫠 When you teach 80+ students, it can take hours to read, evaluate, and grade papers. Honestly, it’s tempting to rush through each paragraph, or even refuse to grade the essay altogether (been there…). After a few years in the classroom, I got so tired of nights and weekends spent grading that I went looking for another strategy.  I want to share a few tips I learned for grading student essays quickly and effectively.

Grading Essays: The Better Way

Tired of carting a stack full of essays home each night? Here are a few strategies that will allow you to leave the essays at school and reduce how much time you spend grading essays.

#1 Peer Review

Imagine if you had a teaching assistant who pre-read student essays for you. They gave each student tips for improving their writing before the essay ever landed on your desk. You’d probably spend less time grading because many of the big issues were solved before the grading began. That’s the hope with peer review.

With peer review, students share their essay with another student. That student uses a guided checklist or rubric to check for big, glaring errors in the essay. For example, they might catch that a student didn’t include a conclusion or that they’re missing evidence in paragraph two. This is also beneficial for the student doing the peer editing. They’ll have to apply what they know about essay writing to another student’s paper. It’s a win-win.

#2 Student Writing Conferences

Before you skip this strategy (because you’ve tried conferences and they were a bust), hear me out. Writing conferences don’t need to be a formal conversation, and you don’t need to rush to fit a certain number of students into the day. What I’ve found to be the most effective are casual writing conferences where you can answer student questions, focus on a specific skill, and offer feedback.

For example, you meet with a student and begin reading through their paper. Your focus for today is text evidence, since that’s what the most recent lesson was about. You ask if the student has any questions about using evidence, and you provide some tips for how they can improve their text evidence. The idea is that by focusing on a specific area, students can more effectively edit. And the better their essay is by the time you’ve begun grading, the easier and quicker it is to grade.

In my workshop, Conferences Unlocked, I give you a step-by-step guide to using conferences effectively in your classroom. I’ll help you ditch the conference stress and try a new method that is casual, conversational, and actually improves student writing. And of course, I’ll talk about how this method makes grading essays a whole lot faster. You can also download the Conferences Unlocked Toolkit with conference templates, conversation guides, and more.

#3 Essay Rubrics

Rubrics aren’t a new strategy, and yet for years, I graded without them. Oops! Rubrics keep you consistent with your grading, help you provide quick feedback, and keep you focused on specific parts of the essay.

Let’s say the first category on your rubric is the thesis. You’ll find the thesis and decide which category on your rubric it fits into. By selecting or circling that category, you automatically have a grade or point value for that part of the essay, and you’ve given the student feedback on how well they did writing their thesis.

In The Hungry Teacher’s Hub, I have multiple full-sized writing units (and an entire writing curriculum) ready to go for ELA teachers. Each unit includes essay rubrics to guide your grading and provide helpful feedback to students.

#4 Focused Grading

This might sound controversial, but it’s one of the best strategies for grading essays. Don’t grade it all. 👀 Especially at the beginning of the year, when you haven’t covered several essential grammar skills or writing skills, student essays are going to have gaps. Instead of getting hung up on what they don’t know, focus on the parts of their essays they should have nailed.

For example, you might focus only on organization and text evidence when grading their first essay. That doesn’t mean you ignore the rest of their paper, but when it comes to deciding on a grade or providing feedback, you focus your energy where it matters most (instead of wasting time on skills that still need sharpening).

#5 Assess, Don’t Edit

One of the biggest mistakes teachers make when grading essays is playing the role of copy editor. They start adding commas, fixing spelling mistakes, and pointing out capitalization issues. Yes, grammar is important. But when grading essays, I like to look at the bigger picture. Are they nailing the formatting? Have they answered the prompt?

If you’re noticing a lot of grammar mistakes in their writing, repurpose their essays. Have them self-assess their own grammar in a station activity. You can also assign it as a bell ringer to fix comma mistakes inside their most recent paper.

If you’re tired of spending hours grading essays, The Hungry Teacher’s Hub is where you want to be. When you join the Hub, you get access to all of my past workshops. Several of which cover writing conferences and specific writing units (so you feel confident teaching, grading, and providing feedback). The Hub also includes access to my complete writing units and curriculum, which contain day-by-day lesson plans, teacher slides, activities, rubrics, conference templates, and more. Learn more about The Hungry Teacher’s Hub!