This is worth understanding for a practical reason rather than a sympathetic one. How your professor feels about grading is what determines how fast your work comes back, how much feedback is on it, and how receptive they are when you ask about a mark.
Updated August 2026
Why professors dislike grading
The volume
Grading scales badly. A set of essays that takes fifteen minutes each is a full working week for a class of 150, and that week has to fit around teaching, research, supervision and administration. Some instructors have teaching assistants; many mark everything themselves.
It is repetitive
Reading the fortieth response to the same prompt is genuinely hard to stay sharp for, and fatigue is where inconsistency creeps in. Rubrics exist largely to hold the standard steady across a long marking session — they are a defence against the professor’s own tiredness as much as a guide for you.
Staying consistent is difficult
Unconscious bias is a real hazard in subjective marking. Impressions formed in class can colour how generously an argument is read, and most instructors are aware of it. Structured criteria, anonymised marking and second-marking all exist to manage a problem the profession openly acknowledges.
The stakes are uncomfortable
A grade can determine whether someone passes, keeps a scholarship, or graduates on time. Applying a standard fairly and knowing what it costs a particular student are not in conflict, but holding both at once is draining — and it is hardest exactly where a student has clearly worked hard and still not met the criteria.
Feedback takes longer than marking
Assigning a number is quick. Explaining what was missing, why, and what to do differently is the slow part, and it is the part instructors most often run out of time for. Thin feedback is usually a symptom of workload rather than indifference.
Subjective work has no answer key
An essay that makes an unexpected but well-argued case is harder to grade than a wrong equation. The instructor has to decide whether it met criteria written with a different answer in mind — a judgement call that takes real thought and is easy to second-guess.
Backlogs and burnout
Marking arrives in concentrated waves at the end of term, colliding with everything else. Once a backlog forms it tends to compound, and the quality of feedback is usually the first casualty.
What actually happens between submission and grade
Most students picture one person reading one paper and writing a number on it. On substantial assessments there is usually more machinery than that, and knowing it explains a lot of the delay.
A calibration pass
Many instructors skim a sample first to see the spread before marking anything for real. It is how they work out what a strong answer actually looks like in this cohort, on this question — which is not always what they expected when they wrote the prompt.
Marking against the rubric
The bulk of the work: reading, locating evidence for each criterion, and recording a justification that would survive being questioned. This is why a mark cannot simply be revised upward on request — it has to remain consistent with every other script in the pile.
Moderation or second-marking
On many courses a colleague reviews a sample — typically the borderline cases, the top and bottom, and a random selection — to check the standard is being applied consistently. Where two markers disagree, the script may go to a third. This is invisible to students and is a common reason results take longer than expected.
A look at the distribution
Before release, departments often check the spread of marks against previous cohorts. An unusually harsh or generous set can trigger a review of the marking or the assessment itself. This is not the same as curving grades — it is a check that the instrument behaved as intended.
Administrative release
Marks then go through the department or registrar before students see them, which adds its own lag independent of anything the instructor does.
The practical implication: by the time a grade reaches you, several people may have looked at the standard, though usually not at your individual script. That is why “the professor didn’t like me” rarely explains a mark, and why a query framed around the rubric travels much further than one framed around the professor.
What this actually means for you
The useful part. If grading is a workload problem rather than an attitude problem, several things students commonly misread become explicable.
| What you notice | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Grades take weeks to appear | A queue, not neglect. End-of-term submissions from several courses land at once. |
| Feedback is two lines | Time ran out. This is the one you can usually fix by asking a specific follow-up question. |
| Marking feels harsher late in the pile | Fatigue is real, which is exactly why rubrics and second-marking exist. If your mark clearly departs from the rubric, that is a legitimate query. |
| Everything is on a rubric now | A consistency tool — and your best friend, because it tells you exactly what earns marks. |
| Some work is peer- or TA-marked | A workload response. Ask who marked it before querying a grade — it changes who you talk to. |
How to get better feedback
- Ask a specific question, not “any feedback?” — “was the counter-argument section the weak part, or the evidence?” is answerable in a minute. An open request needs twenty.
- Ask before the deadline, not after the grade. Instructors have far more time in week four than in the marking crunch, and advice you can still act on is worth more than an explanation of a mark you cannot change.
- Bring the rubric to the conversation. Pointing at the criterion you are unsure about turns a vague complaint into a concrete discussion.
- Use office hours. Spoken feedback costs the instructor far less time than written, so you often get considerably more of it.
- Submit on time and in the requested format. Unremarkable advice, but late and malformed submissions land at the worst point in the queue and get the least attention.
What professors do like about it
Worth saying, because “hates grading” is easy to mistake for “resents teaching you”, and they are not the same thing.
The part instructors consistently describe as worthwhile is discovering what actually landed. A cohort collectively misunderstanding one concept tells them their explanation failed, and that is genuinely useful information. So is watching a specific student’s work improve across a term — visible in a way it simply is not from the front of a lecture hall.
Many also enjoy the unexpected answer: the essay that takes the prompt somewhere they had not considered, or the solution arrived at by an unfamiliar route. That is the counterweight to the fortieth identical response, and it is the reason most would not hand grading over entirely even if they could.
The wider debate about grading
Dissatisfaction with grading is not only about workload. There is an active argument in higher education about whether conventional grades measure learning well at all, with some instructors experimenting with alternatives — detailed feedback without letter grades, or schemes where work is assessed against specifications and revised until it meets them.
You do not need a position on that debate, but it explains something you may encounter: two courses in the same department can assess in noticeably different ways because the instructors genuinely disagree about what a grade is for.
It is also why the assessment style on a course is worth reading properly at the start rather than assuming it matches the last one. A module built around revising work until it meets a specification rewards early, imperfect attempts; one built around a single final essay punishes exactly that behaviour. Same department, opposite strategies — and the syllabus is where the difference is stated.
Frequently asked questions
Do professors hate grading?
Most dislike it, yes — chiefly the volume, the repetition and the difficulty of marking subjective work consistently. Very few dislike assessing students as such; it is the mechanics that wear.
Why does it take so long to get grades back?
Marking is slow per script and arrives in concentrated waves, usually alongside teaching, research and administration. Delays are normally a queue rather than an indication of anything about your work.
Do professors read every word?
On substantial written work, generally yes — a grade has to be defensible against the rubric. On short or objective assessments, marking is naturally faster and may be partly automated.
Does grading fatigue affect my mark?
It is a recognised risk, which is why rubrics, anonymised marking and second-marking exist. If your mark departs clearly from the published criteria, that is a legitimate basis for a query.
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Josh Hutcheson — Editor, PriorityLearn
Josh researches, writes, and updates the answers on PriorityLearn, checking each one against current tools, official sources, and real school policies — and flagging what varies by state or district. About PriorityLearn →