Catch-22 is a long, disorienting novel, and teaching it well means assessing more than one thing. Students need to keep up with the reading, make sense of a scrambled timeline, and eventually produce analysis worth grading. If your only assessment is a final essay, you will find out too late who never got their bearings.

The other extreme is just as painful. A unit packed with quizzes, journals, discussion grades, and two essays looks rigorous until you try to grade it. The workload piles up, feedback gets thinner, and students stop reading your comments because they arrive too late to matter.

A balanced plan gives each assessment a clear job. Some check whether students are reading. Some build the thinking they will need for the final piece. One or two carry real weight and get real feedback.

Here is a way to structure that, starting with what you want students to be able to do at the end and working backward.

Start With the Final Essay and Work Backward

Decide what the culminating essay will ask, then list the skills students need to write it well. Those skills become your smaller assessments. If the final essay asks for an argument about how institutions treat individuals, students will need practice pulling evidence, explaining irony, and handling a long text with a fractured structure.

• Short reading checks focused on plot sequence and character relationships
• A low-stakes journal that captures observations about tone and structure
• One paragraph-length analysis with detailed feedback
• A discussion or seminar that lets students test arguments out loud
• A final essay scored with the same criteria as the paragraph task

Keep Reading Checks Light

Because the chronology of Catch-22 loops back on itself, students often lose track of who did what and when. Brief reading checks can help them stay oriented, but they should be quick to give and quick to score. A five-question check on a few chapters is plenty.

Resist the urge to write comments on every quiz. Use them to see who is falling behind and adjust your instruction. Save your detailed feedback for writing where students can actually improve.

Put Your Feedback Energy in One Place

The paragraph-length analysis is where feedback pays off most. It is short enough to grade quickly, and it lets students practice the exact skill the final essay demands. When they get useful comments on that paragraph, the final essay improves noticeably.

This is also a good spot for AI-assisted grading. A tool like GraideMind can draft rubric-based comments on a full set of paragraphs in a fraction of the time, so you can return them within a day or two. That timing matters, because feedback that arrives while students are still reading is much more likely to be used.

Grade the Final Essay With Consistency

By the time the final essay arrives, students should already know the rubric. Use the same criteria you used on the paragraph task, with the same wording, so growth is easy to see. Consistency also helps you defend grades if a student or parent asks.

Afterward, look at the data across the unit. Which criteria improved from the paragraph to the essay, and which did not? That answer tells you what to reteach next year and where your assessment plan needs adjusting.