Grading intentionally using the Payoff Principle

Get your grading under control by thinking small

Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash

This article first appeared in March 2023 on my other Substack, Intentional Academia which focuses on finding productivity and purpose as a professional in higher education. I referenced it in my post from two weeks ago, and David and I thought you all might find the whole thing useful. If you do, I invite you to subscribe to Intentional Academia where I’m currently running a biweekly series on rebooting productivity habits to recapture a sense of purpose as a faculty member.

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Nobody likes grading. I co-author an entire blog and have a book coming out this summer on grading, and even I don’t like it¹. And guess what my morning schedule is devoted to today, once I post this article? You guessed it — a giant two-hour time box devoted to catching up on grading. It never ends, does it?

Don’t get me wrong: Done mindfully and with some alternative systems in place (see that other blog and the forthcoming book for more on that), grading can be… well, if not “enjoyable” then at least somewhat fulfilling, because it’s a direct window on our students’ intellectual growth, and watching this take place is rewarding. But even those rewards don’t change the fact that grading is hard work, often emotionally draining and usually incredibly time-consuming, and the natural reaction of most faculty is to avoid it whenever possible and for as long as possible.

And yet, it still needs to be done, because our students need feedback on their work and we are the ones to give it to them². So in the spirit of Intentional Academia, I want to share with you my coping mechanism for the ever-self-replenishing piles of grading to do. It was one of my first applications of Getting Things Done when I started using that framework years ago, although you don’t have to be a GTD disciple to make use of it. I call it the Payoff Principle.

What is the Payoff Principle?

I’ve also referred to this idea as the “Amortization Principle”, but that doesn’t have cool alliteration. It’s based on the idea of amortizing a loan, like a home mortgage. The root of both of those words, “amortization” and “mortgage”, refers to putting something to death. And that’s what you do, when you amortize a loan: You take the loan amount, determine the amount of time you want to take to pay it off, then split the loan up into many equal-sized individual payments that eventually pay off the loan in the amount of time you specified, i.e. slowly putting that loan to death. (Or “to bed”, if that’s too morbid.)

If you own a car or a house, you know all about this. If buying houses were only done by paying the full amount of the house in cash up front, virtually nobody would own a house because virtually nobody has $350,000+ sitting around with which to buy one. So instead, to make home ownership doable, you take out a $350,000 loan from the bank and split it up into monthly payments. The bank, of course, charges interest on those payments so it can make money by lending. But supposing there was no interest, you’d split those payments up into (often) 360 monthly installments that are each just south of $1000 — still a lot, but at least within the realm of possibility.

This idea of amortization can be applied to any sort of “debt”, including grading.

Grading “tasks” are (usually) not tasks

To understand how this applies to grading, first realize that most grading “tasks” are not tasks at all: They are projects. In GTD language, a “task” refers to a single action, typically something that can be done in a single sitting; while a “project” is by definition something you want to get done that requires more than one task (and you want to get done within a year).

Confusing the two is where many faculty get bogged down with grading. Students take an exam in a class, for instance, and the prof receives the pile of papers or LMS submissions. The big mistake that many faculty make at this point is putting Grade Exam on their to-do list. Unless the class size is under five students and the exam is trivial, there is simply no chance that “Grade Exam” is one single action that can be done in one sitting — any more than buying a $350,000 house is doable for most people in one payment.

So when you put “Grade Exam” as a to-do list item, it is so big as to be psychologically unapproachable: Your brain will go into fight-or-flight mode when you see this to-do list item, same as if you received a bill for $350,000 for your place of residence. And quite naturally, you will cope by avoiding it.

The Payoff Principle for grading

This gets us to the Payoff Principle. It’s simple. When faced with an assignment to grade, do two things first:

1. Determine the time frame in which you want to have the assignment graded. For example, I tell my students that any work they submit will be graded and back to them within seven business days. Then,

2. Split the grading of that assignment up into individual bite-sized tasks, each of which can be completed in a single sitting of about 20-25 minutes.

I use 20-25 minutes as a rule of thumb, because I like to use the pomodoro method of working in 25-minute sprints followed by 5-minute breaks. You can make this a little shorter or a little longer depending on how you work. And you have to use your judgment to estimate how long things take, which can sometimes be wrong. But I advise against making these tasks/sprints longer than 30 minutes because grading is taxing and grading with low energy is dangerous.

Then, crucially, there is a third thing to do:

3. Take the number of tasks in the grading project and divide by the number days in your time frame. This is your “average velocity” — the number of tasks per day, on average, you need to complete in order to finish the assignment on time. Do this many tasks per day, but no more (unless you just really want to do more).

These three steps are why I think of grading like paying off a loan. You don’t pay off a loan by handing over everything in your wallet, whenever you feel like it. You make a plan: Set up the time frame for payoff, split the debt into equal payments, then make the payments on time. You can pay more in a particular month if you want, but it’s neither required nor expected.

The last part — doing your “daily repayment” of grading but no more — is very important. You have permission to stop grading for the day once you’ve met your daily requirement. Because tomorrow, you’ll do the next daily ration, then the next, and if you keep proceeding at a normal, reasonable pace then you’ll get done when you said you’d get done. Putting this limit on grading is absolutely critical for maintaining your sanity and a healthy balance in life. Ignoring that limit, or not having it at all, I think is a chief source of burnout.

Example

I mentioned I need to grade stuff this morning once I am done here. The item in question is for my differential equations/linear algebra class, called a “Miniproject”. It’s an assignment that requires careful grading. And I have two sections of the class at 30 students each to grade. Here is how I am approaching this:

1. Like I said, I have a standing rule with my class that all work will be graded and returned (on the LMS) within seven business days. That’s my default time frame.

2. I’ve learned over time that I can grade about 6-8 students’ work on these Miniprojects in a 25-minute time frame, on average — about 3-4 minutes per student³. The standard deviation can be quite large; some students’ work takes no time at all, while others take much longer. But that's the historical average for me on this kind of assignment. So I split the grading of this assignment into tasks by grading 1/4 of each section at a time (which is about 6-8 students). I usually do this by student last name, so it makes it easy when using the LMS. I have this list saved as a Textexpander snippet so I can insert it into ToDoist with a keyboard shortcut:

Sec 03 Students B-D
Sec 03 Students E-L
Sec 03 Students M-P
Sec 03 Students R-T
Sec 04 Students A-F
Sec 04 Students H-Mc
Sec 04 Students Me-R
Sec 04 Students S-Z

3. Having decided that students will get their work back within 7 business days, and having broken the grading “task” into 8 equal parts that take 25-ish minutes each, I now have the “velocity” with which I need to work: 8 parts/7 days = about 1-2 of these per day. Except, I don’t like grading on the weekends, so it’s really 5 days, which comes out roughly to 2 of these items per day over a 7-business day period. Each chunk takes about 25 minutes, so this comes out to one hour per weekday basically, on average.

There are other assignments for this class that have their own time requirements, but Miniprojects are by far the most intensive. Overall, the total grading load for my two classes comes out to about 90 minutes a day on average. At my weekly review, I make time boxes for grading each day⁴ and treat these like classes or appointments: My Outlook calendar says “busy” during those times and I do not take emails, phone calls, drop-in visits, or meeting requests during those times.

Then perhaps the most important part: During those scheduled grading times, I work heads-down with no distractions only on grading — and I stop grading Miniprojects for the day once I reach my quota or the end of the time box, whichever happens first. If all I need to do for the day is grade students A-F and H-Mc in Section 04, and I finish that in 45 minutes, then even though I still need to grade students Me-Z, I’ll get to them later. I’m for the day; I have other stuff to attend to (often it’s other grading tasks) and I like to sleep at night and have fun on the weekends. Sure, there’s always grading tasks nagging at me, but I have the ability and the right to say: I’ll get to you when it’s time, which is not right now.

In this way, if I follow the schedule — which to be fair, doesn’t always happen because sometimes I get lazy, or there’s a ton of other work to do, or I misjudge a time requirement — then I will get done with all the grading when I told students I would be done. And everybody is happy (with the timing at least, if not the grade itself).

But what about…

…getting pushback from others for making myself unavailable? If you are worried about telling people not to contact you during certain times of the day because you have set aside that time to grade — try it once, and see what happens. I have yet to encounter anybody who experiences real pushback about it; most people don’t care, or even think highly of you for prioritizing your time. If you are really worried about it, put these time boxes where people wouldn’t contact you anyway. When my kids were littler, my grading boxes were 5:30-6:30am five days a week so I could get done before they woke up. I don’t recommend this, but it’s what worked for me at the time. The important thing is simply to put a box around your grading and only grade when you are in the box.

…students not getting work back immediately? If you are concerned that students want their work back as fast as possible — don’t be. My experience through almost 30 years of teaching is that students don’t necessarily want instant feedback — they want prompt feedback on a dependable schedule. They want profs who can consistently get things back to them on time, even if that time takes a week, as long as it’s fast enough that they can use the feedback. In the time that I have been using this Payoff Principle on a 7-business day time frame, I have never had a student complain about how long it takes to get work back. In fact I usually get high marks for getting work back quickly, because I think it makes an impression that a professor thinks enough about their needs to have a system at all.

…still not having enough time to handle all my blocks? If you have more teaching than I do (which is likely since I have reassigned time) then the principle still applies, you’ll just have to think about budgeting the week with bigger time boxes. This process will not shrink your syllabus any, but it will put things in a definite order, which is the next best thing. (Then, in the future, think about not assigning so much stuff to grade in the first place.)

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I don’t think grading is ever going to become the highlight of someone’s day (unless they’re having an epically bad day). Using something like the Payoff Principle can, at least, spread the work out over time so each individual part of it is something we can live with. And if we do that, lowering our stress levels in the process, our grading will be that much more useful for students.

1. In fact, perhaps I dislike grading especially much because of how much research and writing I do about it. The more you learn about grading, the more fed up with it you tend to become.

2. Although I am cautiously hopeful that generative artificial intelligence might one day step in and make faculty’s lives truly easier by doing our grading for us, or at least acting as our “teaching assistant” to do some of it.

3. If this sounds way too fast to be “careful”, keep in mind that I am using specifications grading, so I am only grading the work on a “pass/fail” basis using these guidelines for “pass”. I am not splitting hairs over point allocations, just determining whether or not the work is “good enough”. This significantly reduces the time per student, which I can re-invest by giving helpful feedback. If you struggle with getting bogged down on individual student work with point allocations, I highly recommend switching to this system.

4. Not always literally 90 minutes per day; typically it’s two hours on Tuesday/Thursday, one hour on Monday/Wednesday, and then I schedule grading time on Fridays depending on how things are going Friday morning.