Everyone knows the feeling of the last couple days of the quarter ticking down. You’re refreshing PowerSchool praying nothing dropped, when you see that your teacher who’s been spamming assignments at you all quarter finally decided to grade them. Two points off on an assignment you did more than a month ago? Missing, since when? The quiz you thought you aced came back with a C, and now you have a unit test tomorrow. Slow graders are infuriating to students, the stress and anxiety make you want to rip up your textbook and throw it out a window.
Slow grading isn’t just annoying, it hampers students’ abilities to improve outside of class. Only some teachers realize an important truth: grades are feedback on your understanding of the material. Seeing a change in grades helps students decide what they need to study and which classes they’re struggling with.
Every year at the start of school, the first couple of assignments are tests of each teacher’s speed. Getting stuck with the slow grader makes the class much less enjoyable, time you could spend reviewing is instead spent anxiously waiting, praying those questions you guessed on were right.
If teachers are having such a hard time grading assignments quickly, they shouldn’t assign so much work. What’s the use of an online gradebook if students only see a wall of assignments that are only collected or turned in? What’s the point in all these assignments, that are supposedly meant to check your understanding, if you can’t see how you did? How can you improve and learn if you don’t know how well you’re doing?
