Grade Essays Faster!

How Does Semi-Automatic Grader Work?

It plugs right into Microsoft Word. Simply put, you spot an error and click a button. Bang! Thorough, clear, and appropriate feedback appears instantly in a tidy comment balloon in the right margin. The instant feedback often includes hyperlinks that lead your students to helpful sites online where they can study examples, practice, or read still more detailed explanations of their habits.

NOTE: The actual comment balloons are larger, so you can read them more easily than what appears here.

As a high school teacher and college professor, when I graded paper essays, I often found myself wondering, "What if Johnny doesn't know that 'frag' means 'sentence fragment'? More troubling, what if Johnny knows that 'frag' means 'sentence fragment,' but doesn't know what a fragment is, or how to avoid committing one!"

As I began to grade online, I found myself typing more and more feedback, which, of course, increased my already burdensome grading load. The tools you see on these pages were born of necessity, and they have become a powerful, helpful method for speeding and improving the feedback I provide to my students.

One of my favorite tools is a button that inserts a live, Microsoft Excel-based rubric at the end of my students' essays. You get eight rubrics bundled with my software, and best of all, they're all customizable. Obviously, the grade weights and point distributions that work for me won't work for everyone. So just open the excel file, make any changes you like, and hit "save" (do not rename the file!). From now on, the macro button named for that file will insert your custom rubric instead of mine!