Marking Mocks: Time-Saving Strategies

Teachers are currently spending hours and hours marking mock exams, and the common theme on Facebook at the moment is how to reduce the time spent marking. This inspired me to write a short blog.

My own A-Level Psychology students are about to sit their mock exams, and I am not looking forward to the marking! Having said that, I have a plan…

Last year I had large groups in both Year 12 and 13 and needed to find a more time effective strategies to give feedback on their mock papers. Instead of writing feedback on their exam papers, I decided to write feedback comments for each question on a separate sheet. Essentially I was writing an examiner's report for each exam that they took. Now, this probably sounds like it is time-consuming but it took considerably less time to complete than I had taken in the previous years.

After marking all the exam papers, I typed up my ‘examiner’s report’ and gave a copy to each student so that they could add an EBI (even better if) and WWW (what went well) to their exam paper. I didn’t just focus on the negative point, I also added explained where students did well, so it was visible to students where they could improve. They then followed this up with some DIRT (Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time).

The feedback from the students was very positive, and they felt it was a useful way to receive feedback. I will be writing my next examiner’s report this week, after my Year 13s complete their mocks on Friday.

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