The London Times Higher Education Supplement has an editorial up on the practice of marginal annotation in paper grading. Here's the link:

Margins Aren't Meant to be Written In

While most of the author's points were fair, many of them also seemed rather obvious. Yes, of course margins are a bad place to "explain a misunderstood concept" -- that's what the end-of-document comments are for.

The author comes to that conclusion, writing "Would it not be better to read the essay through, making brief marginal indications of minor slips, and then write a considered response as a whole on a separate sheet?" Well ... yes, it would. I find it puzzling, though, that something this obvious has been presented as a kind of revelation or challenge to current practice.

My first inclination was to put it down to differences in academic culture between the UK and the US. There are indeed some instances of this; for example, later in the essay the author discusses "'essay assessment' sheets, which are now used at most institutions", referring to the mandatory administrative paperwork that most UK universities require for every submitted piece of written work. But I don't think that cultural differences can fully account for the disparity of annotation practice. I've studied in both the US and the UK, at both undergraduate and graduate levels in both countries, and never noticed a marked British tendency to use the margins of my papers for substantive comments on the content. My impression instead was that in both culture teachers tend to reserve their most substantive comments for -- surprise! -- "a separate sheet" at the end of the essay.

Other portions of the essay felt mildly antiquated to me. Surely a more radical alteration to annotation practices would be to switch to an entirely electronic life-cycle for student work, with teachers making annotations using the commenting features available in most modern word processors? The author does in fact address electronic commenting, but only towards the very end of the essay, and briefly. Clearly paper-based marking is alive and well in Britain, since most of the essay is focused on dealing with limitations imposed by the physical format of paper.

Some other points are make good sense -- for example, the author calls for a "two-shot" essay submission system in which students submit a finished first draft and then revise it. That seems a good approach, and in fact is already in wide use in America. I do not mean to imply that the two-shot proposal is another instance of obvious conclusions, though. Though there are indeed a great many American courses which structure themselves around a revise-and-resubmit procedure, I suspect it's less common in Britain. At any rate, the only paper I submitted in multiple revisions as a student in the UK was my first master's report. Also, I suspect that revise-and-resubmit processes are generally limited to introductory level rhetoric and writing classes in America, and that there are likely to be many more classes which use the single-submission model.