EssayGrader v5.2 🎉: AI that grades the way you do

Over the past few months, we've been carefully listening to your valuable feedback and what you tell us about grading. We're glad to tell you that we've now released EssayGrader v5.2, which makes grading revisions, setting up assignments, and checking citations a lot quicker for you.

Here's everything that’s new in EssayGrader v5.2:

• There's a redesigned step-by-step Start Grading page that walks you through your grading setup one section at a time.
• You will see a new graded examples option that has been added to the grading setup. It will let the AI learn how you grade and then grade new essays like the way you would.
• Academic standards are now available right in your grading setup.
• You can now grade up to five revisions of the same essay, and compare any two drafts side by side to see exactly what revisions your students made.
• We now have automatic citation checks to save you from matching every in-text citation to the Works Cited by hand.
• The rubric library is now easier to search, and Schoology is available to everyone.
• You get a feedback refiner that rewrites AI feedback for you, so it sounds the way you want it to.

Let's go through each of these updates in detail and show you how they work inside EssayGrader.

Setting up grading is now a step-by-step process

Before EssayGrader v5.2, the Start Grading page was one long page you had to scroll through from top to bottom. Not to mention, every section was open at the same time:

• Class and assignment name
• Rubric
• Reference material and writing prompt
• Upload student work
• Student level, language, feedback detail, and grading intensity
• Advanced settings and additional grading instructions

It worked, but it was a lot to take in, especially if you were new to EssayGrader.

So we rebuilt the Start Grading page.

Now, when you click Start Grading, you'll see your setup broken into eight numbered steps:

• Details
• Rubric
• Upload student work
• Grading context
• Academic Standards
• Grading style
• Citations and formatting
• Language & rules

In EssayGrader v5.2, each grading step will now stay closed until you click on it, which means you’ll only look at one thing at a time. After you fill it in, you will move to the next one and work your way down the page.

Also, four of these steps have an "Optional" tag next to them: Grading context, Academic Standards, Citations and formatting, and Language & rules.

If you don't need them for an assignment, you can skip them and move on. For a regular assignment, you only need to fill in the details, select your rubric, upload the essays, and choose your grading style.

If you're not sure what a step does, you can hover over or click on the small info icon next to it to get a quick explanation.

And now, you don’t have to worry about missing any required step because you'll know before you start grading. At the bottom of the page, EssayGrader shows "Complete the required sections to start grading," and the Start Grading button stays greyed out until every required step is filled in.

While we were at it, we also redesigned the reference material step, which was present in the previous versions. We moved the smaller grading settings into their own card so they don't get in the way when you don't need them.

Teach the AI how you grade with graded examples

We talk to teachers regularly, and we have realized that every teacher grades a little differently. Two teachers can use the exact same rubric and still disagree on whether an essay is a 3 or a 4.

It’s because the rubric only describes the levels, and the real line between "proficient" and "developing" lives in your head. After all, you've built it up from years of reading student work.

In the previous versions of EssayGrader, you had to describe your judgment in words in the additional grading instructions box to pass it on to the AI.

But in EssayGrader v5.2, instead of describing what makes an essay "proficient", you can just give the AI your previously graded examples to learn from.

In the Grading context step on the Start Grading page, you'll find a new section called Graded examples. Here you can upload up to six essays you've already graded by hand and give each one a label. EssayGrader will then use them as a reference point, and the AI will grade all the new essays the way you would.

By default, you'll see four labels:

• Exemplary
• Proficient
• Developing
• Beginning

You can rename any of those labels to match how you or your department talk about student work. For each label, click Add example and upload an essay that you think fits that level.

Under the graded examples section, you'll also see the Additional grading instructions box. We still have it there so that you can add anything that an example can't show, for example, how you want the feedback to sound or something specific you're looking for in this assignment.

Graded examples are optional and not a necessary step to grade essays. If you don't have past essays at hand, you can simply click Skip for now, and EssayGrader will grade with your rubric as usual.

Grade against the standards your assignment targets

As a teacher, you write most assignments with specific standards in mind. You might work on W.7.2 for informative writing, or CCRA.R.10 for reading complex texts. And when it's time to grade, you want to know whether students actually met those standards, and not just whether they scored well on the rubric.

In EssayGrader v5.2, Academic Standards now has its own step on the Start Grading page. You can attach the standards your assignment targets, and EssayGrader will grade the essays and build your insights around them.

Adding standards to an assignment

When you open the Academic Standards step and click Add standards, a window opens up with a list of standards to pick from.

A good thing is that you won't need to look for standard codes yourself. EssayGrader will suggest standards based on your selected state and the source material you use for the assignment. With every standard, you'll see its code along with a short description, so that you can see if it fits. To select, click Select next to the ones you want.

You can also search for a standard if you already know its code or name. There's also an option to switch states from the dropdown at the top of the window.

Behind the scenes, EssayGrader checks student work against the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph, and we've also reworked how state-specific standards are looked up, so they're a lot more reliable than they used to be.

Like the other optional steps, you can click Skip for now if standards don't matter for an assignment.

Students can resubmit, and you can see what changed

As a teacher, when you give feedback on a student’s essay and they get back to you with revisions, that’s where their writing actually improves.

Before EssayGrader v5.2, though, EssayGrader treated a revised student draft as a brand new essay.

So if you wanted to check what changes a student made (or if they made any), you had to:

• Open both versions side by side in different tabs
• Look at the parts where your feedback comments were
• And make your comparisons yourself

It used to take you time, and we saw the struggle.

But now, we are happy to tell you that you no longer have to compare revised submissions yourself.

You can now grade up to five revisions of the same essay, and each one stays linked to the original. When a student resubmits through your Learning Management System (Google Classroom, Canvas, or Schoology), EssayGrader will link it back to the first draft automatically, so you won't find a stray copy in your class list.

Revisions can also be added manually in the “All Submissions” section by clicking the three dots corresponding to the original submission and selecting “Upload new revision.”

The AI also analyzes the earlier drafts of students while grading the new one. So if you told a student to tighten up their evidence and they did, the feedback picks up on that.

You get to compare revisions without squinting

When the revised submission is uploaded, you can open the essay, and you will see the “Compare revisions” option at the top of your screen. You can click that button, and drafts will open side by side.

EssayGrader will highlight every revision the student has made, whether it's cutting phrases, rewording a sentence, adding additional material, etc. You will also see the updated word count.

On the right side of your screen, you will also get an “Improvement Analysis” tab where you will see:

• Feedback reports criterion by criterion, so you can see right away whether the essay score changed in the revised version as compared to the previous one
• Grammar section where grammar mistakes get sorted into the ones the student fixed, the ones that are still there, and any new ones that slipped in during the rewrite
• AI suggestions that the student has addressed and the ones that they didn’t address

Citation checks are now available too

When there are citations involved in an assignment, we know that checking it becomes one of the most tiring parts of grading. You have to:

• Match every in-text citation to the Works Cited
• Look for missing page numbers
• Make sure every source the student mentions is actually listed at the end.

In EssayGrader v5.2, the AI does all that checking on your behalf.

While setting up grading, just turn on the Citations and formatting step to enable this feature.

Once the essays are graded, you can open any essay and go to the Citations section in the review panel. You'll see every citation sorted into three groups:

• In-text citations: each citation the student used in their essay, marked as correct or needs fixing
• Works Cited: each entry in the student's list of sources, checked against the citation style
• Unmatched sources: sources the student cited in the essay but forgot to add to the Works Cited

When something needs fixing, EssayGrader shows how the citation should have been written. For example, if a student quotes a source without a page number, you'll see the corrected version with the page number added. And if you only want to see the mistakes, click Needs fix at the top to hide the citations that are already correct.

However, you should know that citation checks are only available for submissions that are uploaded as PDFs or Word files. Simply because citations rely on the formatting of the original document.

If you are uploading an essay as an image, a webcam capture, or just pasting the text, the Citations tab will let you know the check isn't available for that essay.

Now you can find the right rubric faster

EssayGrader has 800+ rubrics in its library, and finding the one that is suitable for your assignment used to take some scrolling.

In EssayGrader v5.2, every platform rubric now shows more details about it:

• Subject
• Standard
• State and country
• Grade levels

You can filter the library by any of these. Once you pick your country, the state filter only shows states from that country, so you won't come across rubrics meant for a different region. You can also sort rubrics by grade level now.

We've also improved search and the "Recently used" section, so the rubrics you use often are easier to get back to. And instead of clicking through pages, the list now keeps loading as you scroll.

Also, previously, rubrics shared with you used to show up in both the "My Rubrics" and "Shared" tabs. But now they only appear under "Shared."

Schoology is now available to everyone

If you've been waiting to use EssayGrader with Schoology, it's now out of beta and is available to all teachers. We also fixed an issue where some school admin accounts couldn't import their courses, so imports from Schoology should go through smoothly now.

A cleaner essay view and feedback you can rewrite in one click

We've given the essay view a fresh new look in EssayGrader v5.2, especially to the Review panel. Here are the visual changes that you will see when an essay is graded:

• Each rubric criterion now has its own color
• Scores show up as small pills next to each criterion
• And the edit buttons sit right on the feedback card you're working on.

You can also click any point in the review panel, and EssayGrader will highlight the matching part of the student's essay.

Rewrite feedback with the AI feedback refiner

Sometimes the AI feedback is almost right, but not quite how you'd say it to your student.

But with EssayGrader v5.2, you can ask AI to rewrite the feedback for you the way you want. You can choose one of the preset options or type in your own instruction like "make this gentler" or "make it shorter," and EssayGrader will rewrite the feedback based on your instruction for that particular criterion or the overall summary.

We have also renamed Plagiarism to Integrity Check.

There are a few more LMS updates in this release:

• Better Google Docs export: Exported feedback now arrives as a neatly formatted report with tables, so it's easier for students to read.
• Paragraphs stay in place: When you import student submissions from your LMS, the paragraphs and line breaks now stay exactly as the student wrote them. You won't have to read an essay that shows up as one big block of text anymore.
• Quick links back to your LMS: Clicking a class or assignment title in the menu now opens that page in your LMS, so you can get back to the original assignment in one click.

All of these updates we talked about are now live in your EssayGrader account. You can try them on your next assignment. If you have any feedback or ideas regarding what we should improve in our product, please don’t hesitate to contact us.