Grading homework serves multiple purposes:

• Accountability – rewards timely practice of course material
• Feedback – provides information on where work needs improvement
• Contribution to course grades– reduces the dependence on high stakes exams

For this value, course staff often spend a considerable amount of time and effort.   Are there other less time-intensive ways to provide this value?  Could some of that time and effort be freed up for more valuable or rewarding parts of teaching such as increased individual assistance available to students?

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Here are a few ideas that might be useful in reducing the hours spent grading:

• If students are completing worksheets or use a template to format their homework submissions, use Gradescope’s ability to collect similar solutions to each problem. Then grade each problem in batches of similar solutions.  This scales particularly well for large courses.
  • CTI’s Gradescope Instructions
  • Email canvas@Cornell.edu for help or for their training schedule
• Grade homework on a reduced, categorical scale: absent; minimal or under-developed; developing or partially correct with significant issue(s); developed or close to correct with small errors; well-developed or essentially correct and well explained.
• Have students self-grade their homework and turn in a page explaining where their work differed from the solutions. Grade this page for reasonable existence, and maybe spot check for accuracy.
• Replace graded homework with a quiz on one random HW problem in section. Randomize for each section so students don’t share which problem was chosen.
• Turn in homework (Gradescope or other method) before section. Use some time in section for students to work together to create a combined solution with each student noting what the full solution had that they had missed.  Submitted the corrected work and notes either individually or as a group.  This leads to high HW grades but also very high learning value.
• Grade most problems for existence and one for how well it is done and explained – optional to announce head of time which problems will be graded carefully.
• For project checkpoints, have students compare their work with a rubric, submit their work, the rubric, and a paragraph on what they still need to do to score. Grade on a reduced scale with credit for students identifying where they still need more work on the checkpoint before the final submission.
• For lab reports, focus on a different component for each week. Have students outline other sections and mostly focus on the component that will be graded.  If you have enough reports during the semester, have each component come up twice with more weight the second time (first time is for learning).  Perhaps have the last report a full report taking advantage of what they learned for each component.

These strategies all rely on having some exams or reports or projects that are fully graded in order to give appropriate course grades, but reduce the workload on grading practice work (homework) along the way.