Here's a peek at the mess that my living room becomes when it's time to grade final exams:

I love grading objective questions (i.e. multiple choice) because I can keep all the papers in one pile and just quickly go through the pile. In fact, grading objective questions is so mindless, I can do it while watching TV!

When it comes to subjective questions (short answer, essay, etc.), I have to be a little more creative. The way I like to do it is to grade a few different students' papers first to calibrate. Then I start to make piles like you can see here - organized from best answer to worst answer. Then as I keep going through the stack of exams, I'll sort the new papers into a currently existing pile, or make a new in-between pile if necessary, and make sure that I keep answers of similar strength in the same score range. I re-sort all the papers for each new subjective question to make sure they are all graded as fairly as possible. It's definitely a lot of work (and makes the living room quite messy!), but I do think it helps me to be more objective as I grade.

How do you strive for objectivity when grading subjective questions?

I've gotten so many good ideas from my teachers in my master's program. One of them is to offer extra credit to students who turn an assignment in early.

This has multiple benefits. It encourages students to start working early instead of waiting until the last minute to start on their assignment. This means less stress for students and higher quality work (generally). It also benefits the teacher in allowing them to get started on grading early rather than waiting until a hundred essays come in at the same time and feeling totally overwhelmed and buried in grading.

This semester, as an experiment, I offered each of my classes an extra credit point on one of their big assignments if they turned it in a week before the due date. I wasn't sure how many, if any, of them would take me up on this offer, since I'm pretty sure they've never heard of anything like that being done before.

To my great surprise and pleasure, most of my undergraduate writing students turned their essay in early this week. Many of them even came out of their way to find me since their class this week is canceled (due to Dragon Boat Festival), and I told them if they wanted their extra credit point, they'd have to find me before or after one of my other classes.

My postgraduate students have an assignment due June 23. Same procedure for them; if they turn it in by June 16, they get one extra credit point. Today, the first student submitted her assignment. I haven't looked at it in detail yet, but from my quick read-through, it looks pretty good.