Ask a teacher what takes the most time outside the classroom and the answer is marking. Ask what changes as a result of it and the answer is usually much less confident.
That gap is the whole problem. A great deal of marking effort goes into detailed written comments on work that has already been superseded, for students who look at the grade and turn the page. The way to mark faster is not to care less; it is to stop spending the effort where it does not land. And that starts with a decision most teachers skip: decide what a piece of marking is for before starting it. There are only really three purposes — to find out what the class as a whole has not understood so you can reteach it, to give an individual student something specific to act on, and to produce a record for reporting. Those three need completely different amounts of writing, and treating every set the same way is where the hours go.
For the diagnostic kind, mark the class rather than the scripts. Read through with a blank sheet beside you and tally the errors as they recur; you are producing a list of what went wrong and how often, not feedback on each script. Ten minutes of the next lesson spent on the three most common errors reaches every student who made them. Writing the same correction thirty times reaches each student once, privately, in a book they may not reopen.
Feedback only counts if it is acted on. The comment a student does not respond to has produced nothing — the most reliable finding a teacher can act on, with a straightforward consequence: if you write feedback, timetable the lesson time for students to use it. That constraint is clarifying. If there is no time to act on it, either the feedback is not needed or the time has to be found. Both are better outcomes than writing it into a vacuum. The three purposes, sorted:
| Purpose | What it needs | What it does not need |
|---|---|---|
| Find the class-wide gap | A tally sheet and a reteach slot | Comments on each script |
| Move one student on | One specific, actionable line | A paragraph of praise first |
| Produce a report record | A mark and a date | Prose at all |
| Check effort was made | A glance and a tick | Full marking |
Not everything needs to be marked by you. Objective work — recall, definitions, calculations with one right answer — can be self-marked or peer-marked in class against the answers, with you circulating. The students get the correction immediately, which is when it is most useful, and you get the same diagnostic picture by watching where hands go up. This is not a shortcut at the students' expense; the immediacy makes it better feedback than a set returned three days later.
When you do write comments, write instructions, not assessments. “Explain more” and “good effort” cannot be acted on. “Add the unit to every answer in question 3” and “your conclusion restates the question — replace it with what you found” can be. A specific instruction is also faster to write, because you are describing one thing rather than composing an evaluation. Two lines of instruction beat a paragraph of praise on every measure that matters.
Then stop writing the same instructions every year. The same twenty errors recur annually, and writing them out afresh each time is the largest single avoidable cost in a marking pile. Keep a numbered list of your standard comments and write the number on the script, with the list displayed in the lesson — students look up the ones that apply to them, which is an act of reading rather than of skimming past.
One more permission teachers give themselves too rarely: sampling is legitimate. A carefully chosen sample across the attainment range tells you the same thing as the whole pile, in a fraction of the time. Where a school's policy requires full coverage, that is a conversation worth having with evidence rather than a rule to work around quietly. The argument is not that marking matters less — it is that a teacher who is not exhausted teaches better lessons, and the lessons are where the learning happens.
