September 1, 2024
September 1, 2024
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Ultimate Guide on Grading Writing Online vs. Grading on Paper

Grading writing can take time and effort. Teachers are often under pressure to provide feedback quickly while balancing multiple assignments across different classes. AI in the Classroom can help optimize the grading process. 

This blog will explain why grading writing assignments is so valuable and offer tips on making it more efficient. You'll learn how EssayGrader.ai's grading software for teachers can help you save time on writing assignments so you can provide meaningful feedback without the stress.

What Is Grading in the Classroom?

Persons Discussing - Grading Writing

Grading refers to scoring classroom assignments, tests, or exams to evaluate student performance. It helps students, instructors, and even schools understand how well students learn course material. 

The Purpose of Grading: Why Do We Do It? 

Grades serve several important purposes in the classroom. First, they evaluate student performance and help identify areas of strength and weakness. In addition, they communicate this information to:

  • Students
  • Parents
  • Instructors
  • Future employers

Grading also helps motivate students to continue learning by creating goals to achieve as they work toward mastering course material. Grades help organize classroom activities by marking transitions in learning and bringing closure to:

  • Lessons
  • Units
  • Courses

The Challenges of Grading: Why Is It So Stressful?

Grading can be stressful for instructors and students alike. Instructors are pressured to accurately reflect student performance in grades and maintain fairness throughout the grading process. Achieving these goals takes time, and instructors often feel rushed with so many competing priorities. 

Students' grades represent their performance and mastery of course material. When students achieve their goals, they can move forward with confidence. If they are disappointed with their grades, it can hurt their:

  • Motivation
  • Cause anxiety

Common Struggles of Grading Writing

People Discussing - Grading Writing

First off, letter grades suck. Assigning a single letter grade to student writing is one of the most demoralizing tasks a teacher must face. It doesn’t matter if the student is a good writer or not. Addressing the writing’s mini-lessons, drafts, revisions, edits, and the conversations the student and teacher worked through during the writing process is depressing. 

Why? Because all that hard work is forgotten the second the student sees their grade. All that hard work is reduced to a single score. And for many kids, that score is all that matters. It’s depressing for everyone.

Why Writing Is Different For Everyone

Some students start writing assignments on the high end of the standard spectrum, while others must catch up. Some have lots of support at home and access to technology, while others have no access to technology and can only work in class. 

Some take every second afforded them, and some waste every second. Regardless of effort and growth, at the end of the quarter, I have to assign a single grade to each essay based on a rubric. Sure, I don’t think the C papers were C papers. It’s that the student will only see the C.

Rules and Regulations

They will think all the hard work, growth, conferencing, revising, and editing were for “nothing.” That singular grade does not tell the story of the road to reach that final product. As writers well know, it’s the process of writing that is where we learn and grow, not the product.

Why Grades Are So Confusing For Students

When I try to emphasize the process, students are confused and upset when the “product” is not an A. They did what they were supposed to and expected a grade for that. They don’t understand that the process and the product are different. Our system only gives credit for the product. 

What is the point of having standards if, rather than working with those standards and reporting on the process to master them, kids are given a letter grade that only shows compliance and that they checked boxes on a rubric? That they handed in a product.

The Unfairness of Grading Writing

Grades need to be clearer and fairer. The current system benefits students of higher socioeconomic status who have access to early childhood education, support at home for homework and reading, are native English speakers, have at least one educated parent who can advocate for them, and have their basic needs met. 

It’s unjust, and quite frankly discriminatory, to the kids who do not come to school with the same advantages as others.

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How Can You Save Time Grading Writing Assignments?

Girl Reading Book - Grading Writing

Built-In Rubrics: A Simple Yet Effective Time Saver

Students write better when they know what is expected of them. This is especially true if they have a rubric handy while writing. Instead of stapling a rubric to the back of an assignment, I like to embed the rubric within the response sheet.

Rubric Integration

If students write a short response to literature, I’ll create a response sheet with the prompt, a place to write their answer, and a small rubric embedded at the bottom that outlines the criteria on which they will be graded. 

Not only does this help students focus on the task at hand, but it also saves time when grading. With a more miniature rubric to assess, I can quickly check for understanding of the skills addressed without getting bogged down with marking every error.

Let Students Choose the Graded Response

When students practice writing, they often complete multiple drafts of an assignment before submitting a final product. They may write several annotated bibliography paragraphs before the teacher collects them for grading. Instead of grading all the paragraphs to assess students' understanding of the task, ask them to choose one paragraph they would like you to grade. 

This helps reduce redundancy in grading, and students are usually relieved they get to choose the one that likely represents their best work.

Hold Revision Conferences with Students

Hold revision conferences with students instead of marking up every paper to send students on their way to revise. Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and meet with each student for that amount of time. 

Don’t go over it. During this time, point out what you would like them to revise and have them take notes on what you are telling them. This strategy puts the ball entirely in their court, which is good. Some students are used to teachers doing all the thinking for them.

Skim Rough Drafts and Use a PowerPoint for Revisions

You can cut back on time spent grading essays by first skimming through the rough drafts. Notice common errors. Make a list. Then, turn it into a PowerPoint or some other visual aid you can use to present the list to students. Include examples (from their papers to make it authentic if you think your students wouldn’t be too embarrassed). 

My students LOVE this, except when I tell them I want them to revise their rough drafts. Then they groan. Otherwise, they love it. It works. Here are my revising and editing points for argumentative writing, PowPoint.

Limit the Length of the Assignment

Do you need a five-page paper to assess the skills you are teaching? If so, go for it! If not, cut back the length of the assignment. In the past, when I’ve given students word limits, I’ve received sass, like, “Is it because you don’t feel like grading more than that?” 

More than that, students can’t always write fifteen pages because they don’t know how to be concise. That’s a skill, too. We need to teach students how to say more in fewer words. Sometimes, I only have my students write one paragraph when we are practicing a new skill.

Differentiated Instruction

When I teach argumentative writing, I differentiate for various ability levels by offering an option to write one solid argumentative research paragraph. My advanced students warm up to argumentative writing with the same lesson. Differentiating expectations appropriately for struggling writers lightens the grading load. 

Scaffolding has also helped by front-loading students with smaller-scale assignments, enriching their ability to write quality research papers.

Use Comment Codes for Constructive Feedback

If you’re anything like me, you find yourself writing the same comments over and over and over and over. Why don’t we just develop a comment-code sheet? Every comment you make regularly can have a number. 

Instead of writing “Run-On” next to every error, just highlight the correct code and include the comment paper when you hand back the graded piece of writing. I wouldn’t recommend this option with advanced skills you may have just introduced, but for skills students should have mastered, this option will save time, no need to be a hamster on a wheel.

Use Goobric and/or Google Docs

I don’t always enjoy grading on the computer, but it does beat writing everything out. If you aren’t tempted to check your e-mail, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook every five seconds, grading on the computer can buy you some time in your day. 

If you are interested in this option but don’t know how to use Google features, a quick web search can lead you to some amazingly clear and helpful tutorials. This is not the best recommendation for anyone with social media.

Don’t Repeatedly Mark the Same Error

As I mentioned earlier…we don’t need to write fragment every time a student forgets a subject or verb. Mark it the first time or two, and after that, just write, “Please fix the rest of the fragments throughout the essay,” or something simple like that. 

This way, students know there are more similar issues, but the responsibility to edit their work is theirs…which is how they learn anyway.

Limit Distractions

I’m just as bad about this one as the next person. I’ll start grading an essay, and five minutes later. I wonder if I have any new e-mails? Did anyone like my Facebook post? Has anyone tweeted anything funny lately? If I don’t check Instagram, I might miss the best giveaway in history ever. You get the picture, I’m sure. I have to put my phone away to get any serious grading accomplished. It might even be necessary to get out of the house completely.

Minimize Distractions

Sure enough, as soon as I get into the groove, my daughter comes upstairs and needs me to help her go to the bathroom, get a snack, or tell me that her brother did something annoying. Grading essays goes faster when we can focus. Plan to reduce distractions to maximize productivity.

Assess One Paragraph at a Time

Instead of grading the entire essay individually, try collecting and grading one paragraph at a time. This works best with students motivated to make the corrections you suggested. Assessing one paragraph doesn’t take long, and as long as students take your revision comments seriously, all you should do with the final draft is compare the rough draft paragraph to the final draft paragraph. 

Did they make the revisions you suggested? If so, they did the best they could. The final draft may be flawed, but improvement may be enough to earn an A, depending on the skill(s) you assess.

Fast Grading Process with EssayGrader

Save 95% of your time grading school work with our tool to get high-quality, specific, and accurate writing feedback for essays in seconds with EssayGrader's grading software for teachers. Get started for free today!

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Grading Writing Online vs. Grading on Paper: Pros and Cons

People Working Together - Grading Writing

Grading writing assignments online can feel modern and efficient, but there are some pros and cons to consider.

The most significant advantage of grading online is that it saves paper. No one likes printer jams, and grading online completely bypasses any printer woes. Another perk to online grading is that comments can be auto-filled.

Streamlined Grading

This cuts down on repetitive writing, or in this case, typing, and helps to streamline the grading process. You can also make changes inside the document with tracking, so you don’t have to worry about losing your comments if you need to reorganize or move things around. Plus, typing is typically faster than writing comments by hand. 

If you use Goobric to grade, you can even leave audio feedback and speak comments into a recorder for students. There’s also the added benefit of dialogue with students via chats in comments about specific essay parts. This opens up new opportunities for personalized, timely feedback.

Automated Grading

Using a Google Spreadsheet, you can attach a Goobric (Google rubric) to the assignment and quickly enter numerical values for each area of the rubric, which will automatically be printed at the bottom of each assignment when it's returned to students. On the flip side, my students often tell me there are too many comments or corrections, and they get cluttered up on the side margin, making feedback challenging to track.

Digital Strain

Grading online requires much computer screen time, which can be hard on the eyes. This is especially true if you’ve been staring at a screen all day. Grading online also makes me more inclined to mark everything, which takes me longer. 

Grading online means being at the mercy of technology. Our school Wi-Fi often goes out, which can cause massive interruptions in the writing and grading processes.

Paper Grading: Why It Can Feel So Good

There are some clear advantages to grading writing assignments on paper. First, I grade much faster on paper because I can quickly place checkmarks, which is a hooray moment, and circle items that need further attention. These kinds of marks are challenging to make when grading via Google. Grading by hand also enables me to insert punctuation corrections more quickly. 

Grading on Paper

Another advantage of grading on paper is that seeing the end helps me to stay motivated when grading essays. With a physical stack of documents, I can see how many are left and set goals to help me get through it. The older-aged me likes to get my eyes off the screen, so reading on paper can help with any eye strain caused by the computer. Printed-out essays and assignments can also be taken anywhere. Recently, I caught up on grading when our family was on a car trip. No computer or internet is needed! 

Read and Track Handwritten Comments

There are disadvantages to grading writing assignments on paper, too. Handwritten comments can be difficult for students to read and track. I often ask students to use a highlighter to mark off comments as they work through revisions and edits to keep track of changes. 

Balancing the Pros and Cons of Paper Grading

Grading by paper means you need prominent paper and a printer and that can bring many problems with printers at home and at school. Handwritten comments can take longer to write rather than typing them.

General (Though Not Exhaustive) Grading Standards for Academic Papers

People Working - Grading Writing

Students often want to know how their writing assignments are graded—what is an A paper, a B paper, and so on. Generally speaking, there are two basic ways to determine how your papers will be graded.

  • Understand your assignment, which often will include a rubric.
  • Understand the general grading standards professors usually apply to papers.

Assignments and What Rubrics Have To Do with Them

Virtually every college and graduate-level assignment will include instructions from your professor. Often, rubrics accompany your assignments, which provide criteria for each possible grade you might receive.

Some rubrics can be pretty detailed, breaking down the assignment and describing the grading criteria for each requirement. Other rubrics merely provide general writing standards associated with each grade. In either case, the content is your first and best source for understanding the assignment’s grading standards.

Understand the Rubric

As you familiarize yourself with an assignment and its rubric, keep in mind the following:

  • Prioritize the criteria for a particular assignment over those listed in the section below. 
  • When an assignment comes with a rubric, study it and familiarize yourself. Aside from your professor, this is the best guide to meeting the assignment requirements.
  • Prioritize your professor’s advice above all. College and graduate professors often provide descriptions of their assignments and a list of requirements. Sometimes, these can differ from the accompanying rubric. 
  • If you are ever in doubt about your assignment and its requirements, contact your professor with your questions.

Some General Grading Standards for Academic Papers

Although each professor and class is unique, some general qualities attach to each grade. The following grading standards may be helpful as you assess your writing, but remember, a number of factors ultimately contribute to your grade, including your specific instructor's:

  • Guidelines
  • References

Refer to your assignment or class-specific standards for grading information, and contact your instructor with any questions.

  • The Grade of A The A paper is characterized by outstanding writing marked by superior readability and command of content.
  • The paper thoroughly addresses the assignment prompt. 
  • The paper proceeds in a clear, logical fashion that makes the information accessible to the reader. 
  • The paper’s purpose is clear, followed by details reflecting this purpose.  
  • The style throughout the paper accommodates the reader.

The Grade of B

The B paper is characterized by distinguished writing and fulfills the assignment requirements; however, the writing contains some of the following weaknesses:

  • The paper is well organized, but the content presentation sometimes needs to be improved.
  • The audience for which the paper is intended sometimes needs to be clarified.
  • The student’s diction, at times, is vague and hinders precise communication. 
  • The student’s grammar, mechanics, and formatting flaws interfere with reading and comprehension.

The Grade of C

The C paper is characterized by satisfactory writing that is generally effective but contains any one of the following weaknesses:

  • The paper lacks clear organization, or some material is not clearly explained; the paper’s audience and purpose are unclear.
  • The student’s sentences, although grammatically correct, often make information challenging to extract.
  • The student’s diction throughout the paper interferes with readability, but the reader can still glean the meaning; sections of the paper require rereading. 
  • The paper contains repeated errors in grammar, mechanics, or format.

The Grade of D

The D paper needs to communicate information and contain stronger writing. In a professional work environment, such writing would be considered incompetent because it suffers from any one of the following problems:

  • The paper contains two or more problems listed for the C paper.
  • The paper needs evidence of audience accommodation.
  • The paper needs better diction, such as garbled wording that prevents understanding.
  • The student’s sentences have mechanical errors, such as persistent run‑on sentences and comma splices.
  • The student’s grammar, spelling, or format problems frequently hinder understanding.

The Grade of F

The paper fails on multiple levels. A failing grade on a writing assignment usually means that your paper contains two or more of the problems listed for the D paper.

Can AI Help Teachers With Grading?

People Pointing Towards Screen - Grading Writing

Grading student writing takes a significant amount of time teachers often don’t have. Automated essay scoring, grammar checks, and feedback generation powered by artificial intelligence can ease this burden. Research shows that AI can help teachers save time and deliver consistent feedback when assessing student writing.

AI Writing Coach

AI can help students improve their writing skills before teachers see their work.  An AI-equipped platform can help students:

  • Draft
  • Submit
  • Revise essays

Each time students submit their writing, the AI generates scores and feedback aligned to specific writing dimensions. This process allows students to receive immediate, unbiased assistance with their writing, and it helps reduce the workload for their teachers.

Can AI Tools Replace Teachers in the Grading Process? 

The short answer is no. While AI can help automate the grading process, it cannot replace the nuanced understanding that human educators bring to assessing student writing. Teachers can consider the author’s intent when evaluating writing. 

If students need help communicating their ideas, an AI might fix the surface-level issues without understanding that the student has an underlying knowledge gap. In this scenario, a teacher can provide targeted feedback to help students overcome challenges.

AI-Generated Feedback Doesn’t Always Align with Human Grading

Research shows that scoring and feedback provided by AI often differ from those delivered by human teachers. In a study comparing scores and comments given by an AI to those provided by human teachers on 160 essays, the AI scored the essays higher than the teachers. While there were some similarities in Claim & Focus and Support & Evidence dimensions, the AI tended to provide higher scores on more problematic essays.  

Teachers scored essays lower than the AI, with significant differences in every dimension except for claim & focus,” the researchers noted. On the other hand, in Organization and Language & Style dimensions, teachers were far more likely to score essays at a 1 or 2 while AI scores were spread across 1 through 4, with many more essays at 3 or even 4.

AI Feedback Can Be Hard for Students to Understand

In addition to the differences in scoring, the comments provided by AI can be difficult for students to interpret. When human teachers used an AI tool to help grade student writing, they reported that their students struggled to understand the comments generated by the program. 

In many cases, students would read a comment but needed clarification on what it asked them to do to improve their writing. On the other hand, teachers could put their comments into developmentally appropriate language that matched their students’ needs and capacities.

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28 Amazing Tools for Grading Writing & Giving Feedback

People Discussing - Grading Writing

1. EssayGrader: The Go-to AI Grading Software for Teachers

EssayGrader is the most accurate AI grading platform trusted by 60,000+ educators worldwide. On average, it takes a teacher 10 minutes to grade a single essay, but with EssayGrader, that time is cut down to 30 seconds. That's a 95% reduction in the time it takes to grade an essay, with the same results.

With EssayGrader, Teachers can:

  • Replicate their grading rubrics (so AI doesn't have to do the guesswork to set the grading criteria)
  • Setup fully custom rubrics
  • Grade essays by class
  • Bulk upload of essays
  • Use our AI detector to catch essays written by AI
  • Summarize essays with our essay summarizer

Teacher Trust

Our AI tool helps primary school, high school, and college professors grade their students' essays. On our platform, 60,000+ teachers graded over half a million essays.

2. Showbie: A Hub for Assignments, Communication and Feedback

Showbie is a platform that combines all essential tools for assignments, communication, and feedback. Showbie has an effective gradebook with many other features. You can:

  • Mark and grade your students’ work using the class listing within the Shared Folders
  • Easily grade student work while viewing it
  • Add grades as a value

Audio Feedback

You can also add meaningful text with feedback. You also have some room to add text comments. But the real time-saver is adding audio feedback: just hit record! It’s also possible to quickly look at students' grades by:

  • Assignment
  • Class
  • Individually

You can export grades in a CVS file, as HTML, or in an email template with an attached CVS file.

3. Viper: A Free Plagiarism Checker

Viper is an anti-plagiarism scanner that promises to scan uploaded documents for plagiarism, a serious issue in:

  • Academic
  • Business
  • Publishing circles

It’s aimed at students and is handy for reducing the copying and shopping of term papers and essays. Viper effectively identifies plagiarized passages and notices potentially similar passages, misidentified or misattributed quotes, and other suspicious sentences.

4. ZipGrade: Grade Multiple Choice Tests in Minutes

ZipGrade is a grading app that helps you grade multiple-choice tests in minutes. Scan the tests with your smartphone, and the app does the rest. Not everything is about grades. This app only gives grades, and it’s up to you to know what the students need and what questions I have to explain again. Don’t forget to provide some good feedback!

5. BookWidgets: Create Grading Interactive Assignments

BookWidgets is a learning platform that allows teachers to create interactive lessons for tablets and computers. The tool has over 40 activities, such as:

  • Quizzes
  • Crosswords
  • Worksheets
  • Other interactive teaching apps

Instant Grading

Once the teacher has made an assignment, the student can complete it and return it to the teacher. The assignment or test will have already been graded by the time it arrives! You can track progress and give them constructive feedback through the teachers' dashboard. 

You can access the platform and download the results anytime, anywhere. Check out BookWidgets’ grading dashboard to discover student analytics, auto-grading, and how you can give feedback to students!

6. Thinkwave: A Comprehensive Grading Tool for Teachers

Thinkwave is an app that provides several useful features for teachers and educators. Multiple options, such as a messaging system and custom reports, are available. 

Thus, it’s a comprehensive app that simplifies administrative tasks and provides valuable insights into student performance.

7. Alma: Track Grades and Provide Feedback

Alma allows you to record and track grades, calculate weighted averages, and generate progress reports. You can provide input, comments, and feedback for each assignment.

8. Gradebook Pro: A Powerful Grading Tool

GradeBook Pro is a powerful classroom management tool. Its many features allow teachers to:

  • Categorize assignments and view grades by category
  • Use either weighted or standard grade scales
  • Award extra credit or deduct penalty points
  • Calculate the average score for each assignment
  • Evaluate overall class performance
  • Email grades, attendance, or status reports to students. 

9. Flubaroo: Grade Google Forms Assignments

Flubaroo is a free add-on to Google Forms/Sheets. It helps you grade and analyze online assignments and assessments. You can also email scores to students! With Flubaroo, you’ll be able to get scores for each student, identify students needing extra help, view the average score and a histogram of scores, and quickly identify questions that most students missed.

10. Formative: Get Real-Time Results

Formative lets you distribute an assignment to your students. Students make it, and you get live results. You can follow your students in their learning process of that assignment and give instant grades and feedback. 

It is similar to Google Forms, but it is easier to use and has some other essential features that a teacher can’t miss.

11. Edubirdie: A Plagiarism Checker for Students and Teachers

Teachers and students can use Edubirdie to check whether they used unique resources in their writings or papers. The plagiarism checker lets you upload a file or paste your text and will give your resources a percentage. This percentage illustrates the uniqueness of your text.

12. Cograder: AI-Assisted Grading from Google Classroom

Co-Grader is a popular AI-guided system for grading student work imported from Google Classroom. 

Co-Grader supports rubric-based grading aligned with state standards or customized criteria set by the teacher. Teachers can define grading criteria using rubric templates, allowing for consistent evaluation of student work.

13. Canvas: A Learning Management System with Grading Features

Canvas is a popular Learning Management System (LMS) with various grading and feedback options. 

Canvas provides an array of assessment features. For one, It provides real-time assessment of student responses during a live class or event. It can also automatically grade student assessments and provide detailed reports. Canvas offers analytics dashboards to visualize student assessment results.

14. Smodin: An AI Grader for Essays

Smodin’s AI Grader uses artificial intelligence to grade essays based on:

  • Plagiarism detection
  • Grammar checking
  • Readability analysis
  • Content evaluation

AI Grader can grade short-answer questions and longer forms of writing such as essays and reports. It can also provide feedback and comments on the student’s work, highlighting the errors and suggestions.

Essay Evaluation

It gives suggestions on how to make essay writing more effective and checks the essay for:

  • Plagiarism
  • Readability
  • Word count
  • Vocabulary
  • Tone

15. MagicSchool: A Grading Tool with AI Features

A former teacher designed MagicSchool, an AI-powered platform offering over 60 tools to assist educators. Included are a series of assessment features for educators. 

MagicSchool offers a Rubric Generator and a Diagnostic Assessment Generator for multiple-choice diagnostic assessments on any topic to assist teachers with assessment.

16. Class Companion: Get Real-Time Feedback on Student Writing

Class Companion is an AI-powered tool that helps teachers assess student writing and provides real-time feedback on student writing. Teachers craft assignments, students submit their work, and the AI provides:

  • Feedback
  • Suggestions
  • Hints

Class Companion enables teachers to:

  • Identify areas where students need improvement 
  • Provide targeted feedback

Writing Analysis

The tool provides feedback on the clarity and coherence of student writing, helping teachers identify areas where students need to improve their writing skills. 

It can be used to:

  • Grade assignments
  • Track student progress
  • Generate reports

It supports all subjects that have written assignments, including AP-level classes.

17. Feedback Studio: A Grading Tool with Effective Feedback Features

Feedback Studio by Turnitin features a vibrant range of feedback and grading tools designed to help teachers deliver efficient and meaningful feedback to students.

With Feedback Studio teachers have a comprehensive feedback suite including:

  • Drag-and-drop QuickMarks
  • Written comments
  • Voice-recorded comments
  • Automatic grammar checking

Feedback Features

Teachers can annotate submitted documents directly on the screen, which includes:

  • Text highlighting
  • Embedded comments
  • Shared remarks (to address prevalent issues)
  • Rubrics (to focus feedback on specific assessment criteria)
  • General comments
  • Audio feedback

18. Enlighten AI: An AI Grading Assistant

Enlighten AI is an AI teaching assistant created by teachers for grading, focusing on delivering feedback to students quickly and effectively. 

Enlighten AI syncs with Google Classroom to enable teachers to upload documents, see student responses, and then provide feedback generated by Enlighten AI directly to students.

AI Feedback

Instead of writing detailed and time-consuming individualized feedback for each student, the teacher trains Enlighten AI to understand their pedagogical focus and grading scale so that it can take up the bulk of the feedback process. 

19. Happy Grader: An AI Grading Platform for Short Answers

HappyGrader is a new AI grading platform created by a veteran math and science teacher. It keeps humans in the loop while automating the process of grading exams after students submit their answers through a Google Form or other online form tool. 

HappyGrader uses pattern recognition to recommend that teachers assign full and partial credit to students’ short-answer responses. It also uses AI to predictively score and provide feedback for paragraph responses based on the teacher's rubric.

20. Timely Grader: AI Grading That Supports Students

Timely Grader is an AI grading and feedback platform that streamlines the grading process from rubric creation to grade pass back to the LMS. It also empowers students by giving them access to personalized feedback whenever needed.

Timely Grader offers robust AI-assisted grading capabilities for various assessments such as essays, term papers, and reports. It also provides instructors with explanations and reasoning for each grading suggestion so they can validate the AI's suggestions. At the same time, it gives instructors first-pass feedback for each student submission.

21. Kangaroo AI Essay Grader: An Up-and-Coming Grading Tool

Kangaroo AI is a new AI-powered grading platform in beta mode that offers instant grading. 

Kangaroo AI offers instant grading, significantly reducing teachers' time on manual grading while maintaining consistency in grading standards. Teachers can upload customizable rubrics tailored to specific assignment criteria or learning goals, ensuring a personalized grading experience.

Technical Support

The platform also includes:

  • 24/7 support through RooChat
  • A friendly AI teacher assistant, and operates on a secure platform, ensuring data safety and confidentiality.

22. Vexis: An AI Grading System for Personalized Feedback

Vexis is an advanced grading system that uses artificial intelligence to provide the following:

  • Teachers with detailed grading evaluations 
  • Students with personalized feedback

Vexis AI aims to streamline and enhance the grading process for educators. Vexis AI's Personalized Feedback feature provides individualized comments on student work, while the Detailed Reports feature provides teachers with a comprehensive overview of student performance.

23. Quick Grader: A Free and Simple Tool

This free grading option is fully customizable and features:

  • Half-point values
  • Adjustable grade scales
  • Decimal values
  • plus/minus grading, and it is super user-friendly

24. Grade Grid: Convert Number Grades to Letter Grades

Grade Grid can convert number grades to letter grades for free. The grading scale is customizable depending on the assignment.

25. QuickKey: Grade Assignments Without WiFi

This freebie allows teachers to grade assignments without WiFi! You can also push out quizzes to students directly if they have devices. 

QuickKey syncs with Google Classroom and exports grades into a grade book!

26. JumpRope: A Standards-Based Grading App

JumpRope is a free app for standards-based grading only. If your district uses standards-based grading, this one is for you!

27. Edmodo: Innovative Grading Options

Edmodo enables teachers to grade innovatively through:

  • Online discussions
  • Polls
  • Games

It’s more than just a free grading app.

28. Teacherease: Communicate with Parents About Student Progress

Teachers can use either traditional or standards-based grading to:

  • Communicate with students 
  • Provide feedback on assignments

The app also allows parents to see a student’s progress. Teacherease has a fee, but many districts get discounts.

Save Time While Grading Schoolwork with EssayGrader's Grading Software for Teachers

Wouldn't it be nice to get some of your time back? Grading writing assignments like essays can be fun at first but quickly becomes tedious. Teachers often report feelings of burnout when faced with large stacks of essays to grade, especially when they're under a time crunch. 

EssayGrader can help teachers reduce the time it takes to grade essays so they can reclaim their evenings and weekends. With our AI grading tool, you could go from spending hours to just minutes to grade a writing assignment.  Get started for free today!

How EssayGrader Works

EssayGrader is an AI grading tool that helps educators assess written assignments quickly and accurately. The software uses artificial intelligence to evaluate student essays based on established grading criteria to produce fast, specific, high-quality feedback that educators can use to improve student writing. 

Rather than replace educators, our tool helps them lighten their workloads and mitigate grading fatigue.

Reduce Subjectivity and Increase Consistency

EssayGrader can reduce the subjectivity often associated with grading writing assignments. Even when teachers use rubrics, there's still some inconsistency when grading student essays because human beings naturally have biases that affect decision-making.  

If a teacher knows a student has been struggling, they might unconsciously grade their essay more leniently to give them a boost.  With EssayGrader, you can set your grading rubric, and the AI does the rest, leaving little room for error. 

Customizable Grading Rubrics

With EssayGrader, you can replicate your existing grading rubrics, so the AI cannot guess how to evaluate the essay. You can also develop custom rubrics from scratch to meet your classroom's or individual students' unique needs. This helps ensure you and your students get the most accurate results possible.

Grade Essays in Bulk

Instead of grading student essays one at a time, with EssayGrader, you can assess multiple writing assignments at once. The platform allows for easy bulk uploads so you can quickly get to work, reducing your grading time and providing students with the feedback they need to improve their writing skills.

Catch AI Written Essays

With the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT, students use AI to generate essays they can submit for class. This raises concerns among educators about the integrity of student work and how to assist students who may be using AI to cheat. 

EssayGrader has an AI detector built into the platform, so you can quickly identify any essays written by artificial intelligence.

Summarize Essays for Quick Overviews

Another great feature of EssayGrader is the essay summarizer. This tool provides educators with a quick overview of the student's paper so they can get a good sense of their work before they dive into grading. 

This can help them understand the content before they assess it based on their grading criteria to ensure their feedback is thorough and accurate.

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