By DARYL PUTMAN and LINDSAY ONUFER

Most of us can remember a time in our academic careers when a well-timed piece of feedback made a complex concept click or helped us spot and correct a flaw in our work. Delivering timely, educative feedback has consistently proven to be one of the most impactful ways for instructors to improve student learning (Wisniewski et al., 2020).

Students report that they want and value detailed, individualized feedback (Glazzard & Stones, 2019) and instructors have observed the benefits of giving it. But grading and commenting on student work can be time-consuming, particularly in large courses.

Unsurprisingly, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive in the Teaching Center is how instructors can balance the need to deliver effective feedback with streamlining their grading process to make it more efficient. In this article, we share teaching strategies and educational technology tools that you can use to make grading and giving feedback faster and easier without sacrificing delivering high-quality comments to students.

Consider grading and feedback when designing the course and assessments.

Spending a little bit more effort in advance during your course planning can save more later. It should come as no surprise that many of these options also overlap with making your course more accessible to students; improving accessibility for a few tends to improve the experience for everyone. Some of the ways you can plan to save yourself time later are:

• Build flexibility in your policies and assessments up front. If you establish a policy for extensions, you will spend less time negotiating them with students. For example, you could have a policy that allows every student two automatic extensions during the semester. You can use the Canvas grade center to track these and be transparent with your students. Many instructors already use “drop lowest” grades in Canvas, which is a similar tactic for built-in flexibility.

• Make sure your assessments and feedback align with your learning objectives. Communicate this alignment for every assignment. Not only will this focus your students’ efforts, it will also help to inform your feedback. Feedback for an early, low-stakes practice assessment should be more substantial and include specific suggestions for improvements. It can also help you to decide if you should grade for format, mechanics, and style, or if you should just focus on the content for this assignment.

• Build your course with more low-stakes assignments. Low-stakes assignments might afford you the flexibility to give more generalized or informal feedback. This will give your students more opportunities to practice without increasing your grading burden to the same degree.

• Plan to scaffold more. Guide your students through their high-stakes assessments. Early drafts can be returned with just commentary and no grade. You’ll be dividing your effort and, hopefully, have better final submissions that require less feedback.

• Clearly communicate your goals and requirements to students and provide them with examples, including feedback. This gives your students a model for the kind of work you expect and the kind of feedback you give. If you are using a rubric, make sure it includes performance standards. You can use generative AI to help you: it can test interpreting your instructions, create sample submissions, and begin outlining your rubric.

• If it’s appropriate for your course, utilize group assignments, which reduces your grading time. You can configure Canvas for self-select groups to allow students to organize themselves (or opt to remain solo).

• Try piloting alternative grading. Techniques like minimal grading can be incorporated into your course to reduce regrade requests or “grade grubbing.”

Determine who should deliver feedback.

Providing students with your feedback is essential, but giving students other sources of feedback, particularly before they submit work to you, can reduce the time you spend grading. Consider incorporating:

• Student self- or peer-assessment activities before students submit final drafts of assignments to you. Modeling and facilitating practice or giving students prompts or simplified assessment tools like checklists and rubrics can help them learn how to examine their own work or their classmates’ work critically. Self- and peer-assessment also promote meta-learning and a better understanding of expectations for assignments.

• Referring students to academic support resources like tutoring or the Writing Center to revise their work before submitting it to you. Encourage them to visit these resources earlier in the process, not just for a near-final draft.

• Giving whole-class feedback on performance trends you noticed when you were grading their work. This technique can be a helpful way to debrief about exam results or to address common strengths and areas for improvement in students’ work.

Focus on high-impact feedback.

To make the most of the time you spend giving feedback, focus on offering meaningful comments and incentivizing student engagement with feedback. You can do this by:

• Giving feedback that provides students with information about the quality of their work, a rationale for constructive criticism, and suggestions for how to improve, which is more impactful than giving students positive or corrective feedback alone (Wisniewski et al., 2020).  
• Modeling how to use feedback, then creating incentives for students to apply it. You can allocate some quantity of class time for students to reflect on their work and plan revisions based on your comments or award a small number of points for work or reflective narratives that demonstrate how feedback informed corrections or improvements students made to their work.  
• Asking for feedback on your feedback. Feedback should be part of an ongoing dialogue between instructors and students. Encourage students to use office hours to ask questions to help them clarify their understanding of feedback. Consider asking for student feedback on assessments during class discussions or by conducting quick polls using tools like Top Hat.  

Select technology tools strategically.

Which tech tools you use (or avoid) for your course can have a big impact on your effort when it comes to grading. Different tools have strengths or weaknesses in different scenarios and it’s important to use the right one for the task. Here are a few tools you can use:

• Use a comment bank. Canvas SpeedGrader has a comment library where you can save comments for easy reuse. Or just keep a document of common notes to copy and paste to your students. Gradescope and TurnItIn Feedback Studio have similar features. You can also use generative AI to fill in details for less-common feedback.

• Give practice quizzes. You can build Canvas Quizzes to give instant feedback to students. Quizzes allow you to give different feedback depending on which answer was selected and more generalized feedback whether the correct answer was selected or not. You can also set the quiz to allow multiple attempts. This kind of quiz is especially useful for knowledge- or self-checks. Top Hat also has a similar feature.

• If you are using peer assessment, Peerceptiv can be set to assign grades automatically based on peer reviews. The system also will calibrate scores across your entire course to reduce the impact of a student giving only top marks or weak scores. It also adds a “feedback on the feedback” step for students to evaluate the quality of the feedback received. This has enabled some instructors to utilize peer assessment even for large enrollment courses.

• Perusall, a social annotation tool, can grade automatically based on engagement. Students will be awarded points based on their interactions with the system and with each other. You can moderate collaboration and  give generalized feedback or only participate when necessary. Also for engagement-based grading, another simple tool is to set an assignment to Complete/Incomplete in Canvas.

• Turn your discussion boards into group discussions with randomized membership. This will break your class up into small groups allowing them to make more meaningful contributions to the discussion with each other. This can cut down on “I agree!” and other low-effort responses for you to filter through.

• If you grade work according to a checklist or subtract points for common mistakes (as many STEM instructors do), try Gradescope. It will allow you to build a checklist style rubric to add or subtract points for each box you tick. It also manages your regrade requests. Plus, Gradescope has one feature we wish every tool had: the ability to see if our students looked at the feedback we gave them.

While there is no one best way to grade and offer feedback, selecting the best combination of strategies and tools for your goals, discipline, course size, and modality can improve the assessment process for you and your students. If you are interested in exploring how to improve your grading and feedback practices, contact the University Center for Teaching and Learning at teaching@pitt.edu to schedule a consultation.

Daryl Putman is an educational software support specialist with the educational software consulting team. Lindsay Onufer is program manager of the Assessment of Teaching Initiative and a senior teaching consultant.