WE KNOW THAT LEARNING requires feedback. I can't get better at a task unless I have a clear idea how I am doing, what I am doing right, and what I am doing wrong.
We also know that the value of feedback is inversely proportional to the time it takes to get it.
Yet teacher after teacher will take days, weeks, even months to return assignments to students—getting them back way too late for any learning to occur.
Worse yet, it's becoming increasingly more common for tests not to be returned at all. Many teachers only return the grade.
The reason for this appears to be laziness. The teacher doesn't want the test out there because they don't want to have to write a new test each year. If they don't give the test back, they can be fairly sure no one has a copy, and so they can reuse it.
When I was teaching in the classroom I did return tests—though I was urged by colleagues not to. On the other hand, I confess to not always getting papers back promptly. The longer I taught, the better I got at this. It's a matter of organization, but also a matter of learning how to write an assignment that is easy to grade.
The essence of that trick is very simple. You need to know what the purpose of the assignment is, and you need to design the assignment around that purpose—with clear and explicit criteria. This is why math is so much easier to teach (well) than writing. A math problem is easy to design in this way; a writing assignment takes a lot more thought.
The essence is simple, but the practice takes—well, practice. It is doable, however, and the results are worth it, not only for the students, but for the teacher. When you know exactly what the purpose of an assignment is, it becomes extremely easy to grade.
There's another side benefit. Cheating becomes virtually impossible.
I learned this when I was teaching my first college level philosophy course. I had assigned a paper, and since I had years of high school teaching under my belt the assignment was well-designed.
A student turned in a paper that was quite obviously copied from somewhere. I could tell this because I knew the student's style and ability, and because the paper was obviously publishable. The problem was not what I knew, but how to prove it without question.
I spent hours in the library (in the days of card catalogs) trying to find the source of the essay. I failed.
Finally, I gave up and graded the paper.
To my complete surprise, it was an extremely well-written "F". It was brilliant, but it didn't meet even one of the clear criteria I had set out for the paper. I didn't have to accuse the student of cheating, or prove that the student was cheating, or even touch on the issue.
It resolved itself.
I never worried about cheating—of this type—again.
A job done well is also done easier.
