Your judgement is the foundation on which all marking rests – and what this means for how to maximise the impact of your marking and minimise the time it takes to do it

When you mark learner work, you judge.

Marking is judgement.

As a teacher becomes more experienced, so they tend to mark more efficiently.

This is largely because they have a better understanding of what good looks like, of what they want to see from their learners, and of what problems, errors, misconceptions and mistakes look like.

Over time, the teacher builds up an increasingly detailed, increasingly nuanced understanding that they use to make quicker, better and more accurate judgements.

Judgements centre on an act of comparison.

We look at learner work and compare it to what we know.

This knowledge encompasses many things, including:

Knowledge of the curriculum
Knowledge of past work we have seen from learners
Knowledge of what we expect learners to be doing at this point of time – both as individuals (based on past performance) and in general (based on a wider understanding of learning and progress)
Knowledge of what good looks like
Knowledge of what is likely and what is unlikely (which helps us spot plagiarism, for example)

We can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of our marking by thinking about the criteria we use to make judgements.

This means we accept the idea that judgement involves an act of comparison and then focus our attention on how we make comparisons.

Here are five techniques you can use.

If you are an early-career teacher, reflect on your marking once you have done it.

Ask yourself how you made your judgements.

What did you do to assess learner work?

What comparisons were you making?

Did you use external criteria such as a mark-scheme, or internal criteria that you carry in your own mind?

Did you identify a particularly good piece of work and a weaker one and use these as reference points?

Could you have done anything differently? If so, what?

Reflecting in this way helps you attend directly to the information and processes you use to make your judgements.

You can then use them more effectively in the future – or even change how you are doing things.

Create a piece of exemplar work – one for which you would give full marks – and keep this on hand while you mark.

You can use it as a reference point for making judgements.

It becomes an ideal against which to assess learners’ work.

One caveat is that you should ensure your exemplar work is relevant for the age group you are working with.

If the exemplar is too good then you risk setting up a situation in which none of your learners can gain full marks, because none will be able to fully match your exemplar.

Make a list of the key criteria you use to make judgements when you mark.

Spend a bit of time thinking about the main categories you attend to when looking at learner work.

For example, a philosophy teacher might always call on the categories of clarity, consistency and logic.

Articulating the criteria you use to make judgements means better understanding how the process of marking works for you.

It also means having a list on which to call on while you mark.

This frees up space in your working memory.

You do not have to keep switching your attention from analysing learner work to thinking about how you will judge it.

Begin with mistakes in mind.

For example, an experienced teacher will have an excellent knowledge of the common mistakes learners make when starting out with long division.

By bringing these mistakes to the forefront of their mind they are primed to spot them.

They have picked out a key aspect against which they make judgements and can focus on applying this across the range of work they mark.

This approach is particularly useful if you have a given aspect – such as mistake-making – on which you want to focus and about which you believe feedback will be particularly useful for your learners.

Take a minute or two before you mark to clarify your expectations.

For example, you might identify that you have especially high expectations of the set of books you are about to mark and then make a mental note of why this is the case.

Or you might refine your expectation of what good looks like for work of this type.

Either way, you are taking a moment to sharpen your focus, so that when you come to make judgements you know exactly what you are looking for.