I wrote this about a month ago while procrastinating during marking time. It’s a think-aloud, not a piece with a point, but if you’re a teacher, I’d love your take. What does marking involve for you?

I’ve got several dozen essays to mark again, so instead of doing that, I’m writing a post about it.

Most teachers hate marking. It’s monotonous, interminable, exhausting. There’s just no mystery at all about why so many are drawn to automated marking solutions, AI-generated feedback, and approaches that minimise the marking load like group work and peer assessment.

The occasional person will tell you they enjoy it, but nobody’s pretending it’s not rough. You know what it is? It’s a massive moral burden. What we’re doing when we mark is judging people who trust us. Sure, we can separate the student from their work, but ultimately we are judging work done by a person — and it’s personal.

At the same time, we’ve always got a nasty scabby little voice inside our heads asking:

• is it really their work at all?

• do they care about my feedback? Will they even read it?

• have I got this wrong? Are my judgements even remotely accurate?

So yeah, marking is a lot. Evaluation is the hardest cognitive task there is. And I think as we pour energy and effort and economic resources into trying to reform assessment for the (sour face) “Age of AI”, we’ve largely forgotten to consider the part of assessment that makes all of the difference.

Let me explain something.

The person doing the assignment is the student; the person doing the assessment is the educator. So when we talk about reforming assessment, it seems to me that we’re mostly talking about reforming assignments: the tasks we ask our students to do for us.

What if, instead, we focused on changing what we do as we assess them?

We’d have to start by determining what it is we actually do do. In my context:

• I read the writing they’ve produced

• I watch and listen to the multimedia they create (videos, infographics, illustrations, voiceover clips, concept maps and various other things)

• I inspect the sources they’ve shown or acknowledged (usually citations and reference lists, though of course there are often unstated influences present too)

• I consider what I know of the student, from previous work they’ve submitted, conversations we’ve had, observations of their language style, behaviour and stated interests (or, importantly, lack thereof)

All of the assessing I do is of writing and multimodal design work, produced asynchronously and submitted online. I can’t smell or touch my students (presumably a blessing for all of us) and I can’t control what resources they use to produce their work.

So how do I form a judgement? Well:

• I have a rubric that defines the qualities I should be looking for in the work. I look for examples of those qualities in the work and highlight them.

• I think about how the work as a whole hangs together. Did it do the job I asked for in the brief?

• I think about how the work as a whole makes me feel, and why. To me, assessing is subjective and personal. I consider myself a qualified person, and that makes all the difference, but I am a person and that’s where my expertise comes from. So my own affective response is data too.

• I think about whether and how I’ve assessed this student in the past. What kind of feedback did I give? Was it relevant to this task, and can I see evidence they’ve responded to it?

Then I have to actually synthesise all this and put together some kind of a response to the work. Usually that will include in-text comments (if there’s a written document I can mark up); general commentary (usually text, sometimes spoken/audio, but I personally hate giving video feedback); and, of course, a grade.

So if we’re talking assessment reform, and we’re talking about assessment as what the educator does, then what needs to change?

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As I mentioned above — if you’re a teacher, I’d love your take. What does marking involve for you?