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Free AI Tool · Feedback Drafting

You Have 120 Essays and a Weekend

Searching for "AI essay grading" usually means one thing: the marking queue is winning. Here is the honest version of the help: this tool drafts first-pass feedback against your rubric — you still read every essay, edit every comment, and set every grade. The drafting hours shrink; the judgment stays yours.

The workflow: human in the loop, visibly

Upload → review AI draft → edit → apply your grade. The AI touches step 2 only.

1

Upload the essay and your rubric

Paste or upload a student essay along with the rubric or criteria you already use. The tool reads both — your rubric defines what the feedback talks about.

2

AI drafts first-pass feedback

The tool produces draft comments organized by your criteria: what the essay does well, where the argument thins, which passages need revision attention. Drafts, not verdicts — and no scores.

3

You read the essay and edit the draft

The instructor reads the essay as always. The AI draft accelerates the writing of feedback, not the reading or the judgment — edit freely, delete freely, personalize what reaches the student.

4

You decide the grade

Grading happens where it always has: in the instructor’s judgment, after reviewing the work. This tool does not assign scores, and nothing moves anywhere without you.

What this tool does not do

  • It does not assign grades or scores — not to an essay, not to a criterion, not as a "suggestion."
  • It does not submit anything to any gradebook. There is no gradebook connection.
  • It does not evaluate academic integrity or detect plagiarism or AI-written text.
  • It does not send anything to students. Feedback reaches a student only if the instructor sends it.

Instructor review is required before any feedback reaches a student — by design, in every configuration, including the institutional platform version.

Why feedback drafting is the right way to use AI on essays

The bottleneck is drafting, not judging

English teachers commonly carry marking queues in the hundreds per cycle — NCTE’s work on writing assessment documents the load. Most of the hours go into composing individualized comments, not into forming the judgment. Drafting is exactly the step AI accelerates safely, because the instructor still reads the work and owns every word that survives the edit.

Faster feedback beats exhaustive feedback

Research on teacher feedback and student revision behavior supports a practical truth: feedback that arrives while the assignment is still alive drives more revision than perfect feedback that arrives two weeks later. A reviewed-and-edited AI draft tomorrow beats a hand-composed comment after the unit has moved on.

Why human review is non-negotiable

ETS’s decades of automated-essay-scoring research document both the reliability of machine scoring on constrained tasks and its documented weaknesses — including bias patterns on non-standard discourse and non-native writing. That evidence is exactly why this tool stays on the feedback-drafting side of the line: the machine drafts language; the human judges writing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions from writing instructors and department chairs about AI-assisted essay feedback.

No — and that is a design decision, not a missing feature. The tool drafts feedback comments organized by your rubric. It produces no scores, and there is nothing to "auto-post": grades are decided by the instructor after reading the essay, exactly as before. If you want a tool that grades for you, this is not it, and we would encourage skepticism toward any tool that says it is.

Get the drafting hours back — keep the judgment

Try the free feedback tool on one essay, or see the institutional version inside the platform — with guardrails, budgets, and audit logs your department can govern.

The teacher reads the essay. The teacher sets the grade. Always.