Tips When Grading Assignments to Help Your Students Achieve Success

If you are using one of my Simple Steps to Sentence Sense ebooks to teach grammar and usage, I hope you have discovered that students can succeed, make good grades, and even enjoy learning. 

What a wonderful feeling it is to give students frequent chances to succeed and feel good about themselves!

The way to achieve this is really simple, no matter what concept you're teaching. If you are using my books, break each lesson into several components when grading students’ group and individual practice exercises. (I always let my students trade and grade except on tests.) 

For example, when you do Step 3: Finding the Subject, don’t just check for the subjects that students find in each sentence. That would only give students 20 answers at 5 points apiece and make it easy for them to get a low score. 

Instead, count the prepositional phrase(s) in each sentence as one point, the verb phrase as one point, and the subject as one point. Voila! Now, there are over 60 answers, and students can miss several and still get a decent score. 

Of course, these tips work with any assignment you give your students, whether or not it comes from one of my books. 

For each step, you can decide which parts of the sentence are the key parts. For example, when working on Step 4: Finding the Complements, the key is deciding if the verb is action or linking before looking for the complement. When grading each paper, be sure to count the verb and whether it is an action or a linking verb, along with the complement as key elements in the score. 

Use the answer pages in the back of the book to count the number of elements you plan to score in each lesson. Make your directions clear about which parts of the sentence students are to mark when scoring papers. This is another opportunity for the teacher to re-teach and emphasize that sentence analysis must be done in steps and that the steps must be done in order. Skipping a step is a recipe for confusion and disaster. 

This method could become a bit too much of a hassle if the teacher has to do the math each time papers are graded and figure out the correct score for papers with 63 answers or 71 answers, etc. It could, but it won’t if you download my Grading Scale Chart. 

You can print the chart on both sides of a sheet of paper, slip it into a plastic folder sleeve, and take it with you anywhere. You can even give your students a copy if you so desire. 

Simple Steps to Sentence Sense is an easy and enjoyable way to teach grammar. You will find the books HERE. You know you are successful when you hear students say, “This is fun.” Grammar? Fun? Well, all right! 

Please tell your friends and colleagues about my book. Simple Steps to Sentence Sense is also a useful tool for foreign language teachers, and it is helpful for special education and ESL students.

Visit my store for more helpful resources.

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Hints to Help With Grading Papers

I taught English and creative writing for 35 years, and I don’t even want to calculate how many hours of my life were spent with pen in hand grading papers such as essays, practice assignments, journal entries, short stories, articles, and tests.

I once piled a huge stack of spiral notebooks on top of my car while I unlocked the car door and then drove off accidentally leaving a trail of spiral notebooks all over the parking lot. Oops!

Although I was never able to escape the grading process, I did learn a few things along the way that made life easier for me. Here are a few hints that might help.

1) Always prepare a rubric to give to the students along with a composition assignment. A thoughtfully prepared rubric will clarify exactly what you are expecting the students to write, and the papers will be better and easier to grade.

2) You don’t have to grade everything. Sometimes, practice papers should be just for practice and not for a grade. Verify that the student did indeed complete the assignment, but don’t grade it. If you wish to assign a grade because the student turned in the completed assignment on time, great! I would often assign a plus sign (if the paper appeared to be complete), a minus sign (if the paper was a half-hearted attempt), or a zero if the paper was not turned in at all.

3) You don’t have to evaluate every element of every paper. If, for example, your students have been working on how to write a thesis statement, just grade the thesis statement and not the whole paper.

4) Have your students peer edit each other’s papers and then revise their compositions before they turn them in to you.

5) Let your students grade each other’s papers whenever the assignment requires short answers or multiple choices. If the students trade and grade while you go over the answers with the entire class, you are providing another chance for students to learn. Immediate feedback is always a good idea.

6) Although you can always use a calculator to determine a student’s numerical grade, it is so much easier to use a grading chart. Laminate one or two and keep a copy wherever you might be likely to grade papers: your desk, your car, your home.

For products that help with all of the hints above, visit my store.

Try a grading scale chart.

Practice writing a thesis statement.

Prepare a rubric.

Good luck with grading your stack of papers.
Thanks for reading,

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