“Post grades for all assignments within one week of the due date, sooner if the feedback from one assignment might affect performance on a subsequent assignment. In the event that there is no due date, grades should be assigned within one week of submission.

Provide specific and descriptive feedback with all graded assignments. Specific and descriptive feedback gives information about what the student did well, what the student needs to improve, and how to improve performance on future assignments.”

via Faculty Services | MOU | Extended Learning Institute :: Northern Virginia Community College.

While teaching Composition online is a perfectly reasonable endeavor, the turnaround standard of one week for posting grades and feedback to assignments is not a reasonable expectation once essays start coming in from 4-5 sections at the same time.  This semester, teaching 4 sections of Composition, I kept up with the one week turnaround until midterms.  Then, everything snowballed.  I have been several weeks behind in my grading since about week 8, and now it’s week 14.  It seems like every Composition instructor I talk to is always at least a little “behind” because that’s the nature of the kind of grading we have to do.  If we taught Chemistry and a scantron machine could grade exams, I don’t think we’d struggle with deadlines…  So my question is, is it fair to ask for different standards for the English faculty re: how we “monitor student progress,” since our grading process is different from that of many other disciplines?