Fast grading vs accurate grading — and why you shouldn't have to choose

Ask any instructor of a large course and they’ll tell you grading forces a choice: go fast and risk inconsistency, or go carefully and fall behind. But that trade-off is often manufactured by the process, not the people.

Speed and accuracy come from the same place

When marking is organized by question, graders build up a rhythm and a mental model for exactly one problem at a time. There’s no mental math across an entire script — and less room for errors than when someone is context-switching through a full booklet.

You don’t get accuracy by slowing down. You get it by removing the friction that made you slow in the first place.