Gradescope by Turnitin is a versatile application and online platform designed to facilitate the processes of creating, distributing, grading, and analyzing assessments for educators.

Features: Gradescope leverages AI to offer an automated grading system that streamlines the assessment process. Gradescope accommodates a wide array of assignment types including PDF, online, programming, and bubble sheet assignments, with students having the option to upload PDFs or photos of their work for evaluation.

Gradescope can also sort student responses into groups and grade them collectively, significantly reducing the time spent on individual assessments. The AI can autonomously categorize answers into groups for certain question types.

Grades can be downloaded swiftly with a simple click or keystroke, and promptly returned to students, expediting the feedback cycle. Gradescope is equipped to handle a variety of assignment types, ranging from extensive projects to quizzes and bubble sheets.

Tom’s Take: If you’re looking for an AI grading system that’s both full of features and intuitive, then you should look no further than Gradescope. It’s easy to use and easy to submit student work and it can handle a wide range of grading situations. It also offers a handy regrade option and helps with rubric creation. And if your school or intuition already has a subscription with Turnitin, well it’s a no-brainer.

But if your school or university doesn’t have a subscription, you may be hard pressed to get access to it as an individual subscriber. Therefore, know your grading needs well because they might be met adequately by a an AI grading tool sold directly to educators.

Price: Contact for institution pricing. It’s not listed on their website. According to Software Survey, the Gradescope Basic plan costs $1 per student.

Zipgrade is a grading app that allows teachers to scan and grade multiple-choice tests using their mobile devices.

Features: With Zipgrade, teachers can print their own answer sheets, create custom keys, view item analysis, export results to CSV or PDF files, and share reports with students and parents.

Teachers can use their smartphone or tablet camera to scan the answer sheets and can also scan multiple answer sheets at once. Teachers can see the scores and grades of each student as soon as they scan the answer sheets. They can also review the answers, mark them as correct or incorrect, or add comments or notes. Teachers can see the distribution of scores and grades, the difficulty level of each question, the percentage of correct answers, and more.

Teachers can export the results to CSV or PDF files, or upload them to Google Drive or Dropbox. They can also email or print the reports, or share them with students and parents via QR codes or web links.

Tom’s Take: ZipGrade is designed to grade multiple choice tests and this app/website will certainly help you do that quickly.

You basically use your phone to scan printable bubble sheets and then analyze the data from tests. It’s intuitive, accurate, and relatively cheap. It gets 4+ stars on the App Store, though the reviews are from years back.

But it does little beyond multiple-choice grading and so its features pale in comparison to many other AI grading platforms. That said, Zipgrade is a convenient and efficient tool that provides instant feedback and analysis — and saves paper.

Price: It’s only $6.99 for a year of unlimited scanning. The free plan has a limit of 100 papers per month.

ChatGPT is a conversational AI chatbot from OpenAI that can complete many assessment tasks quickly and efficiently.

Features: ChatGPT is a versatile platform that can undertake almost any written assessment task, including grading quizzes, tests, and essays.

ChatGPT can also help you create a rubric, find a rubric, or simply use the rubric that you provide. It can also help you find and incorporate state standards, writing guides, or other resources to enhance your assessment performance.

ChatGPT is more flexible than most dedicated AI grader tools because the user has more flexibility when it comes to creating prompts. ChatGPT also allows for uploading of documents (ex. scoring guides), which some AI graders do not allow.

Tom’s Take: Big picture, there are two fundamental choices when it comes to grading student work with AI. One is to opt for a general AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini. The other is to use a dedicated AI grading system, like those listed on this page.

If you’re comfortable creating AI prompts (and working with PDF documents) you should strongly consider using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT for your grading tasks. AI chatbots are more flexible than AI grading systems, and you can upload important contextual documents — such as state standards, writing guides, rubrics, and more — that you may not be able to upload to an AI grader. And you can do all of this for free.

But to leverage ChatGPT effectively, teachers need to create effective prompts. Speciality AI grading tools, on the other hand, offer pre-constructed prompts to simplify the process of generating relevant and appropriate content.

Price: The newest, fastest, and most advanced model is GPT-4o and is free to use, though some ChatGPT features are restricted to Plus users.

Designed by a former teacher, MagicSchool is an AI-powered platform that offers over 60 tools to assist educators. Included are a series of assessment features for educators.

Features: To assist teachers with assessment, MagicSchool offers a Rubric Generator as well as a Diagnostic Assessment Generator for multiple-choice diagnostic assessment on any topic.

Furthermore, the Multiple Choice Quiz Generator can generate a multiple choice quiz and answer key based on any text, and the Reading Quiz Generator can create a multiple-choice reading quiz and answer key based on any text. Other tools include a Student Work Feedback TooI that identifies areas of strength and areas for growth and Text Proofreader Tool can take any text and have it proofread, correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation and adding clarity.

Tom’s Take: MagicSchool offers a great range of assessment tools to assist teachers. In addition, students can now enter MagicSchool for Students, a platform offering a range of student-facing tools and resources that enable teachers to assess student work while in the platform.

Price: MagicSchool offers limited free features. For unlimited usage and plus features the cost is $8.33/month.

Created by ex-teachers, Eduaide is a powerful AI-driven teaching assistant with over 100 educational resources, including assessment tools.

Features: Eduaide helps teachers create lesson plans, teaching resources, assignment feedback, assessments, and more.

To burnish its lesson plans offerings, Eduaide offers “lesson seeds”, which include lesson rubrics, engagement activities, quizzes, worksheets, slides, and more.

Its Feedbot option enables teachers to paste in the students work and receive feedback based on various categories — including custom feedback based on your own rubric. In its Assessment category teachers can input a teaching objective or standards based information and Eduaide will generate various types of questions, such as Multiple Choice and Fill-in-Blank.

Tom’s Take:Eduaide is a flexible and wide-ranging lesson planning and summative assessment tool. However, unlike like MagicSchool, Eduaide does not provide student-facing tools, and cannot be used for formative assessment.

Price: Eduaide offers 15 free generations a month. For unlimited access to all tools and resources you’ll pay $5.99/month.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Graded Pro is a new AI-powered grading platform that streamlines the assessment process for most subjects, including Mathematics, Sciences, Humanities, English, Computer Science, and Art.

Features: Fully integrated with Google Classroom, Graded Pro automatically retrieves student submissions, eliminating manual upload tasks and also allowing teachers and students to continue working in a familiar setting.

Graded Pro also supports a wide range of educational standards, including the US Common Core and Advanced Placement, IB curriculum, UK GCSE and A levels, along with other global academic frameworks.

The platform allows for the addition of custom rubrics or solutions, and teachers can review automated feedback before it is finalized and sent back to students.

Graded Pro grades handwritten work and art submissions in addition to digital documents.

Plans to expand support to other LMS's beyond Google Classroom are underway.

Tom’s Take: Graded Pro is well organized, intuitive, and supports all standard file types. It’s a great option if you and your students use Google Classroom.

Graded Pro is adding new features regularly and extending its functionality and usefulness. If you teach in the U.S. or the UK, you will find its alignment with standards especially helpful.

Price: Free trial of 30 credits. $10 for 600 credits and $25 for 1600 credits.

To grade 125 students you would need about 1,500 credits per month.

HappyGrader is a brand new AI grading platform created by a veteran math and science teacher to keep the human-in-the-loop while automating the process of grading exams after having students submit their answers into a Google Form or any other online form tool.

Features: HappyGrader uses pattern recognition to make recommendations for teachers to 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 rubric provided by the teacher.

HappyGrader works by guiding the teacher through the process of creating scoring guides for their exams, which include responses, scores, feedback, and rubrics. These scoring guides are returned to the teacher’s own drive where they can be shared with colleagues, strengthened, and reapplied to future assessments to instantly grade the majority of students’ responses.

Tom’s Take: Happy Grader places emphasis on equitable grading; teachers can not only create scoring guides, but they can share them with other teachers so that grading is uniform. Teachers can also quickly ascertain where students are struggling. It’s convenient too, because students can use any online form tool to submit answers. And Happy Grader handles open-ended questions well, not just short-answer ones.

Google Classroom integration is coming, but not yet operational as of autumn, 2024.

Price: The basic account is free and allows teachers to grade unlimited exams. A Premium account is under construction.

TimelyGrader is an AI grading and feedback platform that streamlines the entire grading process from rubric creation to grade pass back to the LMS. It also empowers students by giving them access to personalized feedback whenever they need it.

Features: Timely Grader offer robust AI-assisted grading capabilities for various types of 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 provides instructors with first-pass feedback for each student submission.

Timely Grader also has feedback tools for students where they can instantly generate feedback on their drafts to enable formative learning. Instructors have full edit capabilities and transparency. Students have a say at our table and are regularly consulted.

Timely Grader also has a built-in rubric generator that will help instructors create an AI-friendly rubric. Timely Grader also integrates with Canvas and D2L. This allows for pulling of student submissions and syncing directly into instructor workflows such as grade and feedback pass back to the SpeedGrader.

Tom’s Take: Timely Grader is well designed, intituitve, and integrates seamlessly with Canvas. It has an excellent range of features, including instant feedback tools and a rubric generator. For the moment Timely Grader does not integrate with Google Classroom, but that is on the developers’ priority list.

Pricing: Free for individual instructors. But LMS integration requires a “pilot-level” contract. Institutions and schools are charged at the pilot level.

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

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

The tool features an AI plagiarism checker that automatically detects the percentage of AI-generated plagiarism, helping uphold academic integrity. Additionally, it generates constructive feedback on writing style, grammar, and argument structure, assisting students in improving their writing skills. The platform's ease of use and seamless integration with existing educational tools further enhance its efficiency and effectiveness in the classroom.

Applications include enhancing remote learning with high-quality AI feedback, preparing students for standardized writing tests, and facilitating writing workshops with instant, actionable critiques.

Teachers can start by signing up for a free account, uploading student essays, customizing rubrics, and reviewing automated suggestions to provide personalized feedback, making AI Essay Grader a comprehensive tool for modern education.

Tom’s Take: UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Price: Free trial.

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.

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 provides 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 it 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.