Also: if you're sorting into "mistakes piles" for single exercises, how can you parallelise marking of separate and independent questions?
[Edit: not disagreeing with your point.]
No grading is perfect, but there’s also some undercurrent of an attitude that students have paid to be there and are entitled to a certain grade.
Given that students have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they'll have to repay no matter what and on top of that a lot of jobs being completely out of reach these days without an academic degree (that for fucks sake isn't remotely required by virtually all jobs requiring it!), that's completely understandable.
Want to fix higher education? Bring the hammer down on companies abusing it as a proxy for legally discriminating against classes of society that are closely correlated with poor academic outcomes. Academic education should be reserved for the best of the best of our youth, and it should be fully paid for by the government, not simply another hurdle to pass to get a job that pays barely more than flipping burgers.
I also think that the vast majority of poorly paid, non-tenured professors and other teaching staff don't love being the targets of this harassment, since it's not their fault and largely out of their control, and it's not like they're getting the bulk of the tuition money. (That mostly goes to administrative expenses and sports programs.)
Heck, most adjunct faculty are often paid below minimum wage and qualify for food stamps.
Would that my students were this engaged before the exam. Guess which students show up the most often for office hours? ... yeah, the ones that are getting the best grades.
If my students spent half as much time learning the subject as arguing with me about grades, they would be getting a higher grade than the one they are arguing for.
It's always three options plus a fourth option (none / all). If you make a mistake you score negative points. It's not perfect, sometimes wording is ambiguous and it's unclear whether you need to tick the fourth catch-all option, but I found it better than the alternatives as it removes most arbitrariness from the process.
Regular exams often had wildly different grading standards for the same course depending on the class, and thus on the professor who was correcting exams. This was really annoying.
Then, each problem was assigned to a TA. Either there's a predefined rubric, or you create it as you go (-1 point for mistake X, half credit for mistake Y, etc.). There's a pretty slick interface where you just read the answer, and use keyboard shortcuts to apply the relevant deductions.
It still has the issue that every time you change the rubric, you'd need to go back and re-do previously-graded instances of that problem. But it was way faster and (equally important) less tiring.
(disclaimer: I briefly worked on the software for my bachelor’s thesis)
When I was grading homework, it took about 5 hours a week per class per run through. They didn't pay me enough to make sense for it to be 10 hours.
Graders know that wrong homework takes much longer than correct homework to grade. It's correct? Full marks, move on. Is it wrong? Well, how wrong is it? Did they make a bad assumption, but followed it through to its conclusion? Did they forget a minus sign? Or is it complete hogwash?
So it might not be 10 hours, but still would be around 8 hours. And that's still too much.
Get all the profs and TA's together, break in to groups taking one problem or set of problems. Then you random sample (each group takes a stack) to get a feel for the 'typical' errors, once that's done - you are a machine going through the stacks.
Every once in a while (not that often) you run into a novel error or approach, and the group discusses.
This ensures that everyone who made the same mistake(s) gets the same grade. It also tends to shuffle the order of the exams after every problem.
Obviously you don’t need this strategy for simple multiple choice questions, and it’s probably also not a great fit for long-form essays. But it worked great for technical short answer problems in CS and security.