A teacher with five sections and about twenty-four students each ends up with roughly 120 essays when a Père Goriot assignment comes due. At ten minutes each, that is twenty hours of reading before a single comment is entered into the gradebook. Few teachers have that kind of time, so many cut corners in ways that hurt students. A realistic plan lets you protect both your weekend and your standards.

Begin before the essays arrive. Finalize the rubric, prepare a bank of common comments, and decide in advance what each score level means. Time spent on setup is repaid many times during grading because you are no longer making decisions from scratch. Teachers who skip this step tend to rewrite the same advice dozens of times.

Next, batch your work by task. Instead of reading each essay fully and writing all comments in one go, do a quick first pass to sort essays into rough levels and flag obvious issues. Then return for focused feedback. This method reduces the mental switching between reading and evaluating, which is a major source of fatigue.

Where the Time Actually Goes

Most grading time is spent on writing comments, not on reading. A typed comment of two sentences can take a minute, and multiplying that by several comments per essay adds up quickly. Reusable comment banks and short, targeted notes cut that time significantly without sacrificing clarity. The key is selecting comments that address the most important issue first.

• Prepare a comment bank for the five most common Père Goriot essay problems
• Grade in blocks of ten to fifteen essays with short breaks between
• Limit written feedback to the top two or three priorities per paper
• Use a consistent scoring order, such as thesis, evidence, analysis, structure
• Reserve final review for borderline scores near grade cutoffs

Letting AI Take the First Pass

An AI grading tool can read every essay against your rubric and draft scores and comments within minutes. You then spend your time reviewing rather than starting from a blank page. For a set of 120 essays, that shift can recover many hours, which you can invest in the papers that need closer attention or in planning the next lesson.

Review results critically. Read a sample of each score range, confirm the tool matches your judgment, and adjust any comments that feel off. If the tool consistently misjudges one criterion, update your rubric wording. You remain responsible for every grade, and the process works best when you treat the draft as a collaborator, not a verdict.

Protecting Quality and Your Energy

Fatigue affects scoring more than most teachers realize. Essays graded late at night tend to receive harsher or more careless marks than those graded in the morning. Spread the work across sessions, rotate the order of papers, and stop when your attention slips. A fair grade at a slower pace beats a rushed grade done in one sitting.

Finally, return essays promptly with a brief class-wide debrief. Students engage with feedback most when it arrives while the assignment is fresh. Sharing two or three common patterns and how to fix them gives everyone a useful takeaway and reduces the need for repeated individual comments on the next essay.