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

Features: With Feedback Studio teachers have a comprehensive feedback suite, including drag-and-drop “QuickMarks,” written comments, voice-recorded comments, and automatic grammar checking. 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, and audio feedback.

Also included is Draft Coach, a feature for students that offers real-time feedback on grammar, citations, and unintentional plagiarism as students draft their work in Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Feedback Studio also seamlessly integrates with popular Learning Management Systems, such as Canvas, Moodle, Schoology, and Blackboard.

Tom’s Take:

Feedback Studio's feedback tools make the feedback process fast, easy, and consistent. The interface is easy to navigate, the tools are robust, and, since teachers can work online or use the app, Feedback Studio is readily accessible anywhere, anytime.

Benefits include the ability to customize and re-use comments. Furthermore, teachers can examine data on student performance, and see originality reports during marking. And some users report that using Feedback Studio encourages them to comment more fully than otherwise.

Yet, Feedback Studio is expensive and does not include Turnitin’s grading counterpart, Gradescope. Gradescope is ideal for grading bubble sheets and short answers and is a perfect compliment to Feedback Studio. But you’ll have to purchase both tools separately.

Also, you may have difficulties using Feedback Studio in Firefox, or on an older PC. And if you’re on an iPad or iPhone, users complain the the Feedbak Studio app crashes. Finally, Feedback Studio requires that student submissions be stored on their servers, raising concerns about data privacy and security.

That said, it’s hard to find a more versatile, robust, intuitive, and useful essay feedback generator tool than Feedback Studio

Price: Contact for institution pricing. There are school/university plans but not individual teacher plans.

Smodin’s AI Grader uses artificial intelligence to grade essays based on plagiarism detection, grammar checking, readability analysis, and content evaluation.

Features: 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. It provides suggestions on how to make the essay writing more effective and checks the essay for plagiarism, readability, word count, vocabulary, and tone.

Smodin offers a variety of other features that can help students and teachers improve their writing skills. These include an AI paragraph rewriter, several plagiarism and AI content detection tools, and a citation machine that automatically generates citations in MLA and APA formats. Smodin also offers a multilingual grammar checker that can check grammatical errors in 30+ content types, including essays, letters, legal documents, and blogs.

Tom’s Take: AI Grader helps provide robust and effective feedback on student essay writing. It offers a comprehensive analysis of your essay’s quality, with detailed feedback and suggestions. It also supports multiple languages and formats, and has a long-form AI writing feature that can generate up to 5,000 words of content.

It has a limited number of writing credits per month, which means you can only grade a certain number of essays. It also has a character limit of 12,000 per text rewrite or plagiarism check.

Price: $0.02 per word for grammar checking, readability analysis, and content evaluation. $0.01 per word for plagiarism detection. (So, 100 essays of 500 words each would cost $100. ) But, It has a limited number of writing credits per month, which means you can only grade a certain number of essays. It also has a character limit of 12,000 per text rewrite or plagiarism check

Enlighten AI is a AI teaching assistant created by teachers for grading with a focus on delivering feedback to students quickly and effectively.

Features: Enlighten AI syncs with Google Classroom to enable teachers to upload documents and see student responses and then provide feedback generated by Enlighten AI goes directly to students. 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 Enlighten AI can take up the bulk of the feedback process.

According to Enlighten AI, it takes as little as one example to train Enlighten AI to grade an essay and that it can cut grading time down from 10 minutes to 2 minutes per essay. Teachers then review the feedback generated by Enlighten AI and then send it and a grade to students.

Tom’s Take: Enlighten AI is well designed to help teachers save time providing feedback on student essays and reports. It lacks several features available in Feedback Studio, but the feedback process is clear and well defined and you can’t beat the price. Enlighten AI is free for teachers to use and its creators say that there will always be a free version available to teachers. And since so many teachers have embraced Google Classroom to streamline the distribution and grading of student work, Enlighten AI will be a welcome addition at many schools. If you don’t use Google Classroom you’re out of luck, but Enlighten AI plans to expanding its compatibility to other Learning Management Systems in the future. In the end, the usefulness of Enlighten AI will depend on the ability of the teacher to train the system quickly and effectively to provide useful and detailed feedback. And that experience may vary greatly from assignment-to-assignment and from user-to-user. In all, Enlighten AI is a great step forward in streamlining the feedback process and saving teachers’ time, while still preserving the teacher-student relationship.

Price: Free

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 and more.

Features: Class Companion enables teachers to identify areas where students need improvement and provide targeted feedback. 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, and generate reports. It supports all subjects that have written assignments, including AP level classes.

Students must be invited by their teacher to access Class Companion, via a unique link or by sending an email invitation.

Tom’s Take: Class Companion has a great range of features for grading essays, providing feedback, and unlocking insights. It aids teachers through the entire process of creating assignments, distributing assignments, creating rubrics, and more.

Class Companion has reportedly been funded $14 million, with investments from the OpenAI Startup Fund and notable angel investors. So, we should see improvements in the months ahead.

Price: Free for teachers

EssayGrader uses artificial intelligence to generate feedback and score essays based on a grading rubric that can be supplied by the teacher.

Features: EssayGrader can provide feedback on various areas of student work, including Focus, Exposition, Narrative Techniques, and Language and Vocabulary. EssayGrader writes a brief report on each area of focus in a rubric and provide a suggested grade for that area. It will also provide an overall grade for the essay. In addition, EssayGrader includes an error report, which highlights punctuation and grammar errors, an AI-detection report, and can summarize long essays.

Tom’s Take: The feedback EssayGrader provides is brief and general. Unlike Feedback Studio, there are no tools to provide customized feedback. So, while helpful, EssayGrader feedback is essentially a starting point for providing detailed feedback on student writing.

Price: The Basic free plan includes 10 essays per month. The Pro plan includes $19/month and includes 200 essays per month. The Premium plan costs $49/month and one can grade unlimited essays.

Teachermate.ai (not to be confused with TeachMateAI) is an AI-powered assessment tool that helps teachers assess student work.

Features: Teachers can leverage GPT4 technology to generate detailed and human-like responses to students’ writing. Teachers can paste or upload student work and also input their own assessment criteria. They can also opt for short or detailed responses. In addition, Teachermate.ai offers three assessment setting — Max Response, Temperature, and Top P — that can help fine-tune assessments.

Tom’s Take: I tried Teachermate.ai by pasting a couple of high school essays and was impressed with the insightful and natural-sounding critique that the Ai generated. I also like that teachers can draw student work from Google Classroom into teachermate.com.

Price: Free plan limited to 5 requests a month and uses GPT 3.5. Paid plan is $9/month and includes 50 requests a month and GPT-4.

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

Features: CoGrader essentially works like this:

1. CoGrader imports students’ assignments from Google Classroom.

2. Teachers then grade the work and provide feedback. Teachers define grading criteria using rubric templates aligned with state standards or their specific requirements. Cograder analyzes the document to detect instances of ChatGPT usage and provides class data analytics. Teachers have the final say, allowing adjustments to grades and feedback to ensure personalized attention.

3. Teachers export the reviewed assignments back to Google Classroom.

Tom’s Take: Cograder is intuitive and well organized, and a great companion to Google Classroom

Price: Free for 100 graded answers.

Canvas is a popular (if pricey) Learning Management System (LMS) with a range of grading and feedback options.

Features: Canvas provides a wide range of assessment features. For one, Canva provides real-time assessment of student responses during a live class or event. It also can automatically grade student assessments and provide detailed reports Furthermore, Canvas offers analytics dashboards to visualize student assessment results. Canvas also facilitates the creation and rubrics and a gradebook.

Canvas also offers other tools to create personalized learning paths for students, gamify learning, and adapt content to learning needs.

Tom’s Take: I used Canvas for years to administer online courses to teachers and was impressed with its features and flexibility. It addresses most formative and summative assessment needs. My students were mostly pleased with its performance as well.

That said, it takes time and thought to create a well-organized and effective administrative system within Canva and some of the tools are clunky to use.

Price: Canvas is sold to school districts and universities, not directly to teachers. So, check if your school or district has a license.

Vexis an advanced grading system that uses artificial intelligence to provides teachers with detailed grading evaluations and students with personalized feedback.

Features: 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.

Vexis AI's OCR technology allows teachers to scan and grade handwritten work with ease, while the Contextual Understanding feature ensures that grading is based on the content of the work, rather than just the format.

Tom’s Take: I came across Vexis recently and so far I’m impressed with the level of detail provided by Vexis grading and its natural sounding feedback.

Price: Includes a free trial and costs $49 a year.