Budget cuts are here. How can departments do more with less?

Class sizes are going up while the number of hands available to grade them is going down. Something has to give — and too often it’s feedback quality or turnaround time.

The hidden cost isn’t grading — it’s coordination

Most of the time lost on large-course assessment isn’t spent marking. It’s spent assigning work, chasing progress, reconciling spreadsheets, and re-checking for consistency. Reduce that overhead and you get capacity back without adding people.

• Assign questions across a team instead of whole scripts to individuals.
• Let response locking prevent duplicated marking automatically.
• Reuse a shared comment library so feedback stays consistent.

Grading team workload distributed by question

Do less, better

Doing more with less isn’t about squeezing people. It’s about removing the busywork between them and the actual teaching decisions the data should inform.