Announcing EssayGrader 4.5 🎉 : Providing the flexibility you need

Grading student writing has always required professional judgment, nuance, and care. With EssayGrader v4.5, we have taken a major step forward in supporting that reality—introducing more precise scoring, clearer feedback, and tools that better reflect how teachers actually evaluate student work.

↔️ Flexible scoring to improve grading accuracy

The most important change in EssayGrader v4.5 is the introduction of Flexible Scoring, and it fundamentally improves how EssayGrader evaluates student work.

Traditionally, rubric-based grading forces work into fixed “bins.” A response is either a 3 or a 4, even when it clearly falls somewhere in between. Teachers know this tension well: the rubric descriptors are right, but the score still feels slightly off.

Flexible scoring removes that artificial constraint.

With flexible scoring enabled, EssayGrader can now assign in-between scores when student work doesn’t perfectly match a single descriptor. This allows grading that better reflects the actual quality of the writing—without changing your rubric structure or adding complexity for teachers.

How Flexible Scoring Works

Flexible scoring adapts to your existing rubric scale:

• Consecutive scales
  If your rubric uses numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, EssayGrader may assign values such as 2.5 or 3.5 when a response partially meets the next level’s expectations.
• Wide or stepped scales
  If your rubric uses broader increments (for example 0, 10, 20, …, 100), EssayGrader can now award scores like 12, 23, or 87 instead of forcing a jump to the next full tier.

Nothing changes about how you build rubrics or how students see feedback—only the precision of the scoring improves.

Why This Matters for Teachers

Flexible scoring isn’t about being more generous or more strict. It’s about being more accurate.

This change:

• Reduces edge-case frustration when work sits between two descriptors
• Produces scores that align more closely with teacher intuition
• Minimizes artificial score inflation or deflation caused by rigid steps
• Makes AI-assisted grading feel less mechanical and more professional

In short, grades now better reflect what the student actually demonstrated, not just which checkbox they happened to land closest to.

This is a foundational improvement that affects every rubric, every essay, and every score.

🗣️ Smarter Tone Handling by Grade Level

Alongside flexible scoring, EssayGrader now handles feedback tone more intelligently by factoring in the grade level during grading.

This ensures that:

• Feedback for younger students is clearer, more encouraging, and developmentally appropriate
• Feedback for older students is more precise, academic, and instructionally focused

The result is feedback that feels written for the student, not just about the student.

📈 All Rubrics Are Now Advanced

With EssayGrader v4.5, Simple Rubrics have been retired. All rubrics are now advanced rubrics with:

• Multiple scoring levels per criterion
• Clear descriptors at each level
• Support for flexible scoring

This creates a more consistent grading experience and ensures that every rubric benefits from the platform’s most powerful features—without requiring extra setup.

🔭 Finding the Right Rubric Is Faster Than Ever

The rubric library in EssayGrader v4.5 now includes filters that make it significantly easier to locate the rubric you need.

You can filter by:

• Grade level
• Grading intensity
• Language
• Created date range

This is especially valuable for teachers and departments managing large rubric libraries or shared standards.

➗ Clearer Feedback Reports with a Movable Divider

The Feedback Report view now includes a movable divider between student content and teacher feedback.

This allows teachers to:

• Focus on student writing when reviewing structure or evidence
• Expand feedback when conferencing or reviewing comments
• Work more comfortably on smaller screens

It’s a small change that significantly improves day-to-day usability.

🗄️ Writing Prompts and Reference Materials Are Easier to Manage

With EssayGrader v4.5, teachers can now find, review, and edit writing prompts and assignment reference materials more easily within the grading workflow.

In addition:

• Image support has been added for reference materials
• Visual sources (charts, diagrams, excerpts, images) are now fully supported

This makes EssayGrader more flexible for real classroom assignments—not just text-only prompts. And if you already have assignment instructions for your students in your LMS, these are now automatically brought in to EssayGrader v4.5 and pre-fill the writing prompt for you.

👓 Exported Reports Are Easier to Read

Report font sizes have been increased across the platform. This directly addresses feedback that reports were previously difficult to read, especially when reviewing longer comments or exporting results.

Why EssayGrader v4.5 Matters Overall

EssayGrader v4.5 centers on flexible scoring, reflecting how teachers assess real student work by honoring nuance and progress over rigid cutoffs. Paired with improved tone handling, stronger rubrics, and clearer feedback, it delivers a more fair and teacher-centered grading experience.

Combined with smarter tone handling, stronger rubrics, better discovery tools, and clearer feedback views, EssayGrader v4.5 represents a significant step forward in fair, accurate, and teacher-centered AI grading.