This doesn’t work if time is of the essence, but.....

If your instructor plops down a big pile of graded papers/tests for each individual student to retrieve;

Rather than wait in a big line to play the sorting game with your classmates, just do something else and wait a couple minutes for everyone else grab their papers and grab yours last.

The only papers remaining should belong to you or absent students, and considerably less time is spent waiting in line and sorting through papers.