Three personal productivity mindsets for alternative grading

You can't make the alt-grading work disappear, but you can make it more manageable

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How do you keep alternative grading methods from taking up huge amounts of time and energy? That's one of the most common questions about alt-grading, and one that I feel deeply. When I first started using specifications grading, I made a lot of bad choices about my system and ended up spending every day in grading jail for an entire semester. Now that I've had a few years to iterate, I'm here today to say that if you have this same question: I have good news, and bad news.

Bad news first: There's no scenario in which "grading for growth" is quick and easy. Grading according to the Four Pillars (especially giving helpful feedback and allowing reattempts without penalty) takes a certain irreducible amount of time, energy, and personal investment. It always will, because evaluating student work in the end is a form of relationship-building when done well, and you can't shortcut such things without sacrificing the relationship you're building. 

But now the good news: There are mindsets that you can adopt that can make the workload more manageable. They involve approaching the work with a plan for handling it, and disciplined focus in doing it. This sounds like productivity, a term that has a bad reputation among academics for several reasons. But for me, "productivity" means intentionality: Controlling the controllables in your work, so you can be fully present with that work and with the people you are doing it for, and so you can have time for the stuff in life that you really want to do.

Let's take a look at three of these mindsets.

Minimize, don't optimize

One of the most apt quotes I have ever seen for higher education comes from management scholar Peter Drucker, who said:

We are really good in higher education at doing the opposite: Building elaborate systems to accomplish tasks that would be better off deleted. It's not just administration that's guilty; we all tend to build too much into our courses, and it spills over into assessment and grading practices. So perhaps the single best way to keep grading, or any other form of work, from taking over is to ask: Does this thing really even need to be done in the first place? And then ruthlessly eliminate the unessential.

In their book Winning the Week, Demir and Carey Bentley give a framework for taking things off our own plates in this way, helpfully abbreviated as TACO:

• Does this task (or assessment, or grading category, etc.) truly need to be done, or can it be Terminated?

• Can the task be Automated or made faster using technology?

• Can the task be Consolidated, by combining it with some other task that's similar and performing them in tandem?

• Can the task be Outsourced by delegating it to someone else?

Right now, summertime, is a great time to practice TACO-ing things out of your life because the pace of life is relatively slow. You can apply it to personal items as well as professional, and in particular you can apply this principle to your Fall courses as you begin to think about their design.

David's recent post about how he is changing his system in Calculus 2 this fall is a great example. He used to have 34 standards that his students needed to meet; now it's 14, which he is achieving through a combination of terminating and consolidating old ones. He also downsized his reassessments procedure so that it's simpler and more manageable, and still incredibly student-friendly and growth-focused even though there are fewer avenues for reattempts. And a big portion of his students' practice experience will be automated using a free online homework platform.

You might have a lot of great ideas when building an alternative grading system for your courses, but just realize that you can't do everything. Think strategically, determine what you can let go of, and then delete it. Future you will thank you.

Think of grading as projects, not tasks

Here's a common grading problem. Let's say I give an exam. Once the exam is done, I collect it, and if I am being "productive", I'll have a to-do list, and on that list I put: Grade exam. Also on this to-do list are things like Reply to department chair's email, Register for conference, and Buy milk at the grocery store. Then I go about my life and do stuff that needs to be done. No problem, right?

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Right, except: When I have time to work, and I sit down with that list, I can only do one thing at a time, so which one do I pick? If I'm being honest, Grade exam is likely to be the very last thing I would choose to do. Every other item on the list is less onerous and provides a more immediate payoff. So I am naturally going to tend towards those things. But there are not just three other items on the list, but dozens or possibly hundreds, all of which (even replying to the department chair) are less intensive and more fun than grading an exam. So the exam gets buried. Meanwhile other grading comes in on top of it, just as arduous as the exam, and things compound and spiral out of control.

The source of this problem is that I've put an item on a list of tasks to do, that is not actually a task. A "task" is something that can be done in one step, usually in a single sitting, like replying to an email or going to the grocery store. Grading "tasks" are typically not like this¹. Grading items are commitments that we have made to get something done, that usually involve multiple steps. In productivity language, we call this a project.

Almost all significant grading "tasks" are not tasks, but projects. And the key thing to realize about projects is that humans cannot "do" projects. We can only do tasks -- single actions, done in a single sitting -- and we can only do them one at a time. Therefore being intentional about grading involves breaking down grading items into a list of single actions that can be done one at a time, in a single sitting.

Let's go back to the exam situation above and assume that the class has 30 students and the exam has six questions. How might I break up the grading of this exam into individual tasks? First, I need to know what a "bite size" looks like for me; I've learned over the years that I can usually grade about 15 students' work on a single exam problem in about 25 minutes² if I am in heads-down, no-distraction grading mode. This gives me a basis for breaking up the project: If each "bite" is a 25-minute sprint where I grade 15 students' work on one problem, that comes out to 12 tasks in all, 13 if you count entering the grades into the LMS. I would put each of those separately on my to-do list³ as "Grade Exam, students A-M problem 1", "Grade Exam, students N-Z problem 1", "Grade Exam, students A-M problem 2", and so on⁴.

So now, the psychologically unapproachable Grade exam has been tamed, broken down into 12 tasks each of which are on the same time/energy level as Reply to that email or Go to the grocery. When I have 25 minutes to enter heads-down grading mode, I can do whatever the next task is on the list and feel like it's doable.

That gets us to the third mindset.

Box off your time

Imagine the chaos if our classes weren't scheduled. As an instructor, you'd simply be handed a list of 30 students and perhaps a list of learning outcomes, and told: Good luck. On one level, this sounds appealing because I like flexibility. But without a doubt, the first thing I would do if put into this situation is impose structure upon it, for example sending an email to students to decide on a schedule that works for all of us. And then once the times and dates are in place, during those times the only thing that happens is the class.

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We need time structures on significant work because we need the freedom to focus. When I teach, during the scheduled class times I am thinking of nothing other than teaching those students. There's no option to sleep in, schedule a meeting during that time, or work on research during that time. Without that structure, the work simply won't get done.

And yet, we don't always approach grading this way. We have either no time structure, or an unreliable ad hoc structure -- grading when we "feel like it"; when the guilt of avoidance becomes unbearable; or if somehow there are other, even less palatable things on our list to do. (See: Procrastigrading) So the third mindset is to treat grading like any other serious commitment we make and schedule dedicated "time boxes" to get it done.

This concept of time boxing is often listed as the top "life hack" to increase productivity, but don't think of it like that if the tech-bro language bothers you. Think of it like scheduling a class. You schedule dedicated times for teaching so that first of all, you don't need to "find the time" to do it, but instead make the time; and second, so that you can work single-mindedly on teaching during those times. Grading, being a particular form of teaching if you look at it from the Four Pillars lens, is no different.

Time boxing is the fundamental organizing principle behind how I do all my work, personal and professional, and it's easy to do once you get the hang of it.

Every week (at my Weekly Review), I look over my tasks, projects, and calendar. Then for all the stuff I want to get done during that week, I create a block of time on my calendar for doing it. This involves deciding in advance what are the most important things to get done in a week, which can be hard. But for grading, it's not hard: I need to set aside enough time during the week to complete all the grading projects (see above) that I have committed to completing in that week. I know what these are, because I have made a commitment to my students that will return each piece of graded work within 5 business days. So if something was turned in last week, it needs to be returned this week.

How much time this involves, goes back to how I break projects into tasks. I had the example of a 6-item exam given to 30 students, that was broken into 12 tasks each of which takes 25 minutes. So that's 6 hours I need to budget during the week to complete that project. I might box off a single 6-hour block for this; or three two-hour blocks during the week, or even twelve 25-minute blocks, depending on how I'm feeling and what else is on the calendar.

But whatever I choose, once the block is put into the calendar, it is a "hard boundary" and I treat the time block like a class, or an appointment. This means that during those blocks, I am heads-down, single-mindedly focused on grading and nothing else. My phone is in airplane mode, email clients are shut down, the door is closed (or I am working at home) -- all distractions avoided. If something happens during that block that gets my attention, I will quickly write it down on a post-it note and get to it later once the block is done, but it gets no more attention until then.

The time boxes are all set up in advance, no later than the Sunday of that week when I do my review. I often have to renegotiate the blocks because of emergent stuff happening, but otherwise I don’t have to “find the time” to grade: it’s already there. 

This approach can add up to a lot of blocks. If I am teaching three classes instead of one, and each one has 50 students not 30, then it's possible that I might end up with more blocks than my calendar can hold. In other words, I am over-scheduled, and I need to make some decisions. I could renegotiate the "five business day" rule with students; I could ask off from some meetings that I don't need to attend; I could put some other project on the back burner; I could find ways to automate certain grading tasks; I could practice increasing the speed at which I can effectively grade; and so on.

This situation is why it's so important to minimize, and not simply optimize: The simplest way to avoid becoming over-scheduled is to cut the work off at the source and never assign stuff in the first place if it's not necessary.

Conclusion

I'd like to conclude with a little shameless self-promotion.

I've been thinking about productivity and intentionality in faculty work for a long time. I have hobbies, a family, and a side gig as a working musician, and it's very important to me that I have enough left in the tank at the end of a working day to devote myself fully to these things. There are major systemic issues in higher education that add unnecessarily to faculty work and burnout, and those need our attention. But I also think that nobody is coming to save us, and the best hope for reclaiming a sense of meaning and purpose in our life and work is ourselves --- and taking some of the biggest steps in this direction is easier than people think.

I have an entire second Substack on this topic: Intentional Academia, which I am resurrecting after a long hiatus because I think these issues are more important than ever. Here are a few articles from the past at that blog that you might also find useful:

• My GTD for Academics series

• Grading intentionally using the Payoff Principle

• Time boxing for academics

• How not to waste the summer

• Three mindsets for the new year

1. Some grading tasks really are just tasks. For example my pre-class assignments involve nothing more than scanning student entries into a spreadsheet created from a Google Form and entering a "0" or "1" into the LMS. This takes me about 20 minutes.

2. Humans are not good at time estimation, so sometimes this is wrong.

3. I don't actually have a single "to do" list, but according to Getting Things Done methodology, I have separate lists for actions in various "contexts", as well as a list of projects, each of which has its own task list. More on that here.

4. Not necessarily literally students whose last names start with A through M; this just signifies "first half" and "second half".