A teacher who wants to move a stack of essays from upload to return needs a clear order of steps. EssayGrader (essaygrader.ai), a rubric-based AI essay grading platform for K-12 and higher-education teachers, gives an AI essay grader workflow with six stages: choose the rubric, add the student writing, handle any handwritten work, grade, review, and release. This guide follows that order and states only what EssayGrader's pages and published facts say.
Grading starts with the standard, not the essays. A teacher can paste or upload the rubric students already received, and EssayGrader takes the criteria and score bands exactly as written. The alternative is the library of 800+ rubrics, which covers all 50 U.S. states, Common Core, AP, IB and ACT.
The grading page also shows settings for the standards, the grade level and the grading intensity. Set these to match the assignment before grading begins.
A teacher can type or paste an essay, or upload files. EssayGrader reads Google Docs, Word files, PDFs, Google Slides and PowerPoint. Google Drive, Dropbox and Box also work as file sources. When a class already sits in Google Classroom, Canvas or Schoology, a whole class can be imported straight from the learning management system.
EssayGrader grades a full class in one pass, from a folder or an LMS import. The teacher does not paste thirty essays one at a time.
| Type of work | How it arrives | What to check first |
|---|---|---|
| Typed essay | Typed in, pasted or uploaded as a Google Doc, Word file or PDF | That the rubric fits the prompt |
| Slides | Google Slides or PowerPoint file | That the criteria suit a presentation |
| Handwritten essay | Photo or scan from a phone, tablet or school printer | The transcription beside the scan |
| Whole class | Folder or LMS import, or one scanned PDF | That every student appears once |
Handwritten timed writes follow the same path with one extra stage. The teacher scans the papers on a tablet, a smartphone or a school printer, then uploads a single PDF holding the whole class's essays. EssayGrader separates the essays, recognizes cursive, print and messy handwriting, and transcribes each one. The handwritten work is then scored on the same rubric as typed work.
Each transcription is kept next to its scan for the teacher to compare. EssayGrader says handwriting lowers accuracy for any AI grader, so the comparison is a working step and not an optional extra.
With the rubric and the writing in place, the teacher starts grading. EssayGrader scores each essay criterion by criterion. Each score names the criterion behind it and quotes the line that earned it. The feedback follows the Hattie and Timperley model and arrives as rubric feedback, a grammar report and a standards mastery report.
A response of roughly 75 words or fewer is flagged and left unscored, because the evidence is too thin to score each criterion reliably.
Review is the longest step for a careful teacher, and the pages say it belongs to the teacher. The results arrive as a draft. The teacher may keep, edit or drop any part of it. The features page names a one-click regrade and an adjustable grading intensity for the cases where a first pass misses.
A useful habit is to read the lowest and highest scores in the class first. Those are the essays where a misjudged criterion costs the most.
The teacher approves every grade, and a student receives nothing until the teacher chooses to release it. Where the class came from a learning management system, the features pages say that feedback reports and grades sync back to it natively.
EssayGrader states compliance with FERPA, COPPA and CCPA. Student work does not train AI models. Once an account or contract ends, the data remains for 60 days so the teacher can export it, and then it is permanently deleted. As of July 2026, EssayGrader has graded more than 3.5 million written assignments, and a first class set is a reasonable way to test the six steps.