6 Top Tips to Reduce Your Marking Mountain

As a teacher, you’re probably used to a lot of marking! Marking is beneficial to your students for so many reasons. It can help them with mastering a concept and showing them when they’ve done a brilliant piece of work.

However, sometimes the marking can build right up and it can feel like you’re swamped. To help, we’ve come up with some top tips on how to reduce your marking load and make it more efficient for you.

Don’t Over Mark

It’s so easy to end up marking every single question and every single task. You should aim to only mark what will be most valuable for your students. Not only that, for some tasks, it may just be okay to stick to making ticks and crosses – this will save you time rather than writing comments. If you’re going to write comments, it might be best to make them small to save you time and make it quicker for your students to learn from.

Don’t Correct All Mistakes

Found a mistake that you keep seeing across your students’ work? Instead of noting it in everyone’s books, it might be a good idea to go over the question with all the students in your class to make sure they’ve mastered the concept. This will also help understanding and it’ll be much quicker than individually writing the explanation.

Use Symbols

Creating different symbols that can mean different things for your students is sometimes a good idea. Use the classic tick and cross for questions that are right or wrong by all means, but you could also use symbols and signs like smiley or sad faces too if they should’ve expanded more or less on their answer.

We’d also recommend not using red pen as this can lower confidence and look negative.

Swap & Mark in Class

Where it’s appropriate and your input is not needed for work that’s done in class, get your students to swap papers or exercise books towards the end of the lesson. Having them mark each other’s work will also give them the opportunity to see how other students may have worked out answers. This will also save you time and mean you can place your focus elsewhere.

Don’t Mark Everything That Gets Handed in

Every so often, you will take in your students’ exercise books. This doesn’t mean you need to mark every single exercise that’s been completed.

Focus on marking tasks that will benefit your students the most and prioritise where you see fit – this will be an effective use of your time!

Marking Is Not the Be All and End All

At the end of the day, some marking doesn’t have to happen right away!

So long as your students have enough time to learn what they need to, remember that marking doesn’t have to be immediate – you need to focus on you sometimes and have time to relax!