Hey guys, do you have any tips on marking exam papers fast enough?

Throughout the years, I always have the tendency to read every single word of the candidates that slowed me down instead.

I know a colleague who could easily mark about 100 papers a day but the most I could do is about 30 papers a day.

Mark by question rather than by script.

Yea. Go through a single question/subsection/section of the entire class first. Rinse and repeat.

Why will it be faster?
Some candidates may have similar answers and you can just give similar marks by just first glance or by knowing gist of the answers. Nevertheless, faster means more chance to mark wrongly though.

+1! Despite the need to flip through a lot of pages/answer booklets, marking according to question is more consistent. Its better to be safe than sorry
Some lecturers got into trouble for marking too fast and not adhering to the marking script when students appeal for a remark

Agree. Mark by question first.

I'm not a lecturer, but I'm doing PhD now and also an RA. So, I help my SV to mark his students' papers from time to time.

I found it hard to mark papers fast enough because of tendency to read very thoroughly students answers. But, over time, I learnt to just SKIM the papers and focus on KEYWORDS rather than long elaboration.

I will use pencil first for marking. And I finalize it with a pen.

Yes, it's true, fast marking prone to mistakes. I will always revisit the papers that earn either very high score or very low one for re-check before finalizing the score.

It helps.

Is this allowed by the university?

u wot mate?

keywords bro. in a few years, you ll do it faster

This post has been edited by balat: Jan 4 2017, 09:25 PM

Thanks everyone. Yes, I have just recently tried marking by questions. It's less headache that way.

Anyway, I believe some of you mentioned keywords.

But I'm also teaching some subjects involving computations. And this has always been giving me headaches when there are a lot of scripts because I'm also giving marks for correct workings despite wrong final answer (and their workings can come in many different forms).

For computations, i always see final answer. If final answer is correct, i'll just glance through the workings.

I think most mark one question at a time as it results in more consistent marking. Personally, it depends on what kind of papers you mark - in my case, maths is easier to do one script at a time. Here's a tip - design your questions and answer scheme well. It'll save you loads of time when it comes to marking.

This is not the worse. Got some SV ask his phd candidate to publish a paper and put SV name as a 1st Author.

Ya, it is non ethical. But it does happen.

That is about ethics. Asking others to mark test papers is another thing.

Not a student responsibility tbh. And for me, it is still related to ethics. SV should not burden his candidate with jobs non related to his study.

Not a good practices to be frank.

obviously