I think this is a great topic of discussion - I'm a new instructor myself, and it is sometimes difficult to understand exactly how much time I should balance between grading assignments, preparing for classes etc...  it seems to me that some of my classes require much more effort than others.  I'm not sure I can provide any consturctive assistance, but I'm very interested to learn what others think or how they handle this situation.

I constantly find myself trying to strike the balance between homelife and preparing for the classroom. At two of the three colleges that I work for, they pay for prep time and it is never equal to the amount of time actually spent. However, I always get paid back when I have great student evaluations of the course or grades at the end of the course. What has been my saving grace in my larger classes is using the scantrons and the automated machines to grade the quizzes and tests. I became so efficient at this type of grading that students would know their test grades by the end of the class! If your facility has not already invested in this equipment, I would strongly recommend your facility invest.  I even put homework questions on a scantron and run the homework through as well and what would have been a 2 hour grading session turns into a 30 minute one! Good luck, trying to find the balance.

It is a fine line to balance work and personal time when it comes for all the class preparation and grading. I agree to the turn around time. Students should have their papers graded as soon as possible, but how? Over the years I’ve had to come up with ideas to produce this. Streamline the tasks to succeed. The extended hours happened without a doubt but had to schedule my time wisely to balance life and work.

Hi Barbara,

Finding a balance between one's professional responsbilities and personal life is a challenge many of us face.  In your post you raise a  number of very good questions about the frequency of getting feedback to students.  For smaller projects getting them back within 24 hours is a good practice to follow.  For major projects set a reasonable time to get the evaluated results back to the students.   Generally this would be a around a week.  This will give you time to evaluate the work without spending excessive hours outside of the class and yet the projects will be fresh in the minds of the students so they will be ready to discuss them when you hand them back. 

Keep your family and your personal life foremost in your life becausee they are most important.  After that you can create strategies for getting projects, quizzes and tests back to the students within a reasonable time frame.  There are not hard or fast rules on returning student work.  The quicker you can return their results the quicker they will know their status in the course and that helps them focus their effort on areas that need improvement as well as areas of competence. 

Some of the other posts contain some very good suggestions for how to reduce the time investments whiile still getting the feedback to students.  Look these over and see if you can use some of these ideas to help your workload to improve.

Gary

Many of the publishers of allied health textbooks now have online supplements to the textbook that allows instructors to create homework assignments, quizzes, and tests.  The best part is a good majority of them will even grade them for you!  Some are extremely accurate in that if the student, for instance, puts in "60 ml" instead of "60 mL" it will count it wrong so you have to know the parameters of the program you are working with.