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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Grading is the bane of my existence. Every time I have to grade homework assignments, I employ various tricks to keep myself working.
My normal approach is to grade 5 homework papers, take a short break, then grade 5 more. It occurred to me just now that this is similar to the "pomodoro" technique so many people here like, except work-based instead of time-based. Is the time-based method better? Should I switch?
Anyway, back to grading 5 more homework papers.
I think using Pomodoros is more fun because you can do things like record how many assignments you grade per Pomodoro. Now you can keep track of your "high score" and try to break it. Competition is fun and worth leveraging for motivation, even if it's with your past selves.
But doesn't that make you inclined to not read as carefully or grade as thoroughly or not leave as many comments? "Oh whatever, that was mostly right. Yay, high score!"
If you're at the point where you need to employ tricks to finish the grading at all, then I think this is unfortunately a secondary concern. Once you can consistently finish the grading, then I think you can start worrying about its quality.
See, I always worry that the easiest way to get through grading is to just give everyone A's regardless of what they turned in. So I feel like you somehow have to factor in a reward for quality or that's what your system will collapse into?
I would never be tempted to do that, but that comes from a strong desire to tell people when they're wrong which is not necessarily a good thing overall.