BY ROGER OCHSE
I ran a company for fourteen years, sold it in 1990, and chose a classroom over a boardroom. I’ve taught college classes for more than forty years total, some of which overlapped with my time running the company, though most came after. I kept teaching once I retired from full-time faculty work—several adjunct sections a term, same as now. I’m grading the same stack you are this term, on the same clock between classes. What that adds up to is a clear view of where the time actually goes—and it isn’t the grading. It’s explaining the same three mistakes to five different sections, in five separate documents, starting from nothing each time.
Nobody is paying you to fix that, as the assignments keep rolling in and deadlines come more quickly. My proposed method fits the ten or fifteen minutes you already have between classes—no new software, no institutional buy-in. It works whether you mark on paper or online; in a lecture hall or a discussion board; on a lab report, a case brief, a problem set, a discussion post, a policy memo. If your feedback tells a student what’s wrong with their reasoning or their evidence, it applies.
If you already keep a bank of canned comments, this isn’t that. A comment bank stores phrasing. It doesn’t tell you which comment to choose, so most people drop three or four on a piece of paper because all of them feel true. The hours don’t go to a shortage of prewritten sentences. They go to redeciding, submission after submission, which problem is actually worth naming.
Pick one problem. Not any problem—the one that matters this time.
Most submissions have several things wrong with them. Marking all of them doesn’t teach more; it proves you read closely. Ask one question before you write anything: If this student fixed exactly one thing before the next submission, what would do the most good? Answer that, mark only that, let the rest go this round. Walking past a real error on purpose is harder than it sounds. It’s also what saves the time—you’re no longer writing four comments when one would move the work further.
Give the mark a consequence, not just a diagnosis.
“Unsupported claim” tells a student what’s wrong. It doesn’t tell them what to do, and it asks nothing of the next submission. Pair the mark with one instruction aimed forward. In a history paper: Name the primary source that would let a reader test this claim. In a psychology lab report: State the alternative explanation your data doesn’t rule out. In a management case analysis: Attach the criterion your recommendation is supposed to satisfy. Same move, every field: Name the one gap, ask for the action that closes it, then hold the next submission to it. If the fix doesn’t show up, that’s what you name next. This is what shortens the cycle—not marking faster, but making the comment cost the student a visible action instead of costing you a repeat explanation next week.
Track what you’re teaching, not how many marks you make.
Keep a running list—one document, five minutes to update, whether you’re marking on a screen or in the margins—of the patterns you’re flagging and how often. In three weeks, you’ll know, without guessing, that half your sections are stuck on the same two moves. That’s when you stop re-diagnosing individual submissions and start opening class with a two-minute example that heads the problem off before it costs you another round of comments.
None of this asks your institution for anything. No policy change, no meeting, no committee. It only asks you to stop marking everything you notice and start marking what you’ve decided matters.
I’m not offering this as a fix for what this work costs any of us—the pay, the year-to-year uncertainty, the time nobody budgets for grading in the first place. Those are real, and no method touches them. I won’t pretend a comment technique stands in for a fair contract. What this can do is give some of the unpaid hours back, starting this week—not a fix, but a way forward, while the larger fight goes on regardless.
Roger Ochse spent fourteen years running a healthcare company before choosing a career in the classroom, including years teaching business communication at business and technical colleges. He has taught college classes for more than forty years, nineteen of them online, and continues to teach adjunct sections after retiring from full-time faculty work. He is a member of the AAUP.
