How to Score an Essay in One Minute
As English teachers, we spend a lot of time scoring essays, which can be exhausting and stressful - especially with impending deadlines. I've been taught many essay grading techniques, but all of them were time consuming, and the resulting scores varied greatly between teachers. For this reason, I took the official state writing rubric, tweaked it, and came up with a simple scoring process that takes just one minute per 5-paragraph essay. Start with a Detailed, Quantitative Rubric To prepare yourself and your students for scoring, start with a detailed rubric that uses quantitative - not qualitative - measurements. This reduces grading bias and means less time spent deciding which score a student deserves. For example, instead of describing a score as "excellent," "good," or "unsatisfactory," get specific with what was there or missing like "all elements used," "a couple elements missing," or "zero elements used." Under ea...