
![specialized essay graders versus grading papers with ChatGPT](/images/robot-A0Nj.webp)

**The short answer is no, the long answer is yes.**

Have you tried grading papers with ChatGPT or Google Gemini? Both have free plans with unlimited quota.

They're simple to use, you register in a few clicks, paste the text, and give the instructions for grading it.

And if it gets something wrong you can guide it in the right direction until it gives you an acceptable response.

Since these tools are free, every teacher can use them. We've made a step-by-step guide showing [***how to grade papers with ChatGPT here***](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-to-grade-essays-with-chatgpt)***.***

But, there is a problem with this grading method. The problem that not many teachers know about.

In fact, this problem is not generally known to people outside of the AI engineering world, because it's not officially accepted. 

The problem is that the AI is getting more stupid; the free models in particular.

### Why was ChatGPT so good?

When ChatGPT just rolled out at the end of 2022, it could do a lot of things. The model had exceptional attention to detail and a high ratio of meaningful answers.

Later introduced the premium GPT4 version was even better. It was so smart that it gave the impression that you were talking to a real person.

This was so by design.

The producer company - OpenAI aimed to create a wow effect which would save it from the need to promote their product as the promotion would happen organically via word of mouth.

And they were right in making this bet.

Very soon [chat.openai.com](https://chat.openai.com) grew to over 1 billion visits and billions of dollars in sales a month without OpenAI having to spend a dime on promotion.

### The new promise from OpenAI

After securing a huge user base and making their model a name, OpenAI pursued another clever strategy. They promised their users to make models faster and prices for the API (programmatic access) lower.

A great promise isn't it? Better service, cheaper. Sounds too good to be true.

And as experience tells, things that sound too good to be true usually are too good to be true. And so it turned out that these benefits are going to happen at the expense of the service quality.

But here's the catch.

The company hasn't publicly accepted that shift. 

In fact this is one of the most ignored topics on the forum. Neither did they change the names of the models, or lowered the price to now much less capable premium model for the general public.

In other words, people still pay 20$ / month for a 'premium' model that is comparable to the one they were getting for free initially.

Profit.

Yet, this truth is not publicly accepted. 

That's why it humbly takes it's place somewhere in-between the annunaki and the golden billion conspiracy theories.

And the only way to uncover the speculation is to compare the statistics of the old results from the past with the new ones. Something the developers have done. Here is a thread on the OpenAI forum where [***tens of developers complain about the models getting stupider***](https://community.openai.com/t/why-chatgpt-4-0-is-getting-stupider-and-stupider/590741) with time.

### Grading papers with ChatGPT now takes more skill

Now, you probably see where I'm getting at. 

With the models becoming more stupid, getting satisfactory results is starting to take more time and skill.

In fact, it's now almost impossible to get a decent reply from the first go with a long prompt.

You have to craft the prompt carefully and use the GPT4o model (premium) to have a chance that it duly fulfills all of the requirements.

Crafting the prompt means choosing proper words in the right order. This is known as prompt engineering.

It was not that critical in the early days when the model was smart, but it became more important as time went by. 

Just like happens with humans, the lower is the intelligence of the person you're talking to, the more carefully you have to choose your words.

Prompt engineering is a fun activity. Especially for people who love thinking. It makes you pay attention to the words and often even discover their true meaning.

But sadly, it's hard.

Therefore, if you intend to grade a paper with over 1k words with ChatGPT, your best bet would be to subscribe to their premium plan, which costs $20 / month because the free model is just not capable of grasping everything without leaving much of the context out.

### How bad is the free ChatGPT model for marking papers?

But how bad is the free model?

Because 20$ is good money in the current economy, and the premium model has a limited quota of 50 messages every 3 hours, why not just use the free version but give it a lot more follow up instructions?

That's how most teachers who start grading essays with AI think, and it kind of makes sense, if not one detail.

The detail is that the amount of time you have to spend on reading and writing the additional instructions is significant.

And so, instead of saving time and effort on having to read the student's work, you end up wasting it on reading AI's replies, writing additional instructions, and then still having to skim the paper to ensure that the AI grasped everything correctly and you won't end up in an embarrassing situation.

Time this and multiply by your hourly wage and you'll get how much you're losing.

That's why using a free AI model is not a good option unless you're very new to it and just want to see how it feels.

And so, if you're planning to get real value out of the AI essay grading a better choice would be to go with the premium version. The amount of effort-and-time-dollars this will save you will outweigh the 20$ subscription fee pretty quickly.

Or there is one more popular solution, which I'm going to reveal in a moment.

### So what is the best option for grading papers with AI?

By now we have learned that ChatGPT has become significantly less capable over time.

Consequently, using it's free version for grading homework is not a good idea because of the significant loss of time and effort on giving additional instructions, and a better option would be using a premium model that costs 20$ / month.

But there's one more alternative that is best in my opinion - using specialized AI essay graders.

For obvious reasons, I'll be talking about Elagrade here, but you can probably extend the same arguments to other software too.

As I've already mentioned, getting good results with ChatGPT in one go is hard because the model usually doesn't read everything you give it.

It reads selectively, especially when the text is long which means that you have to become good at writing your prompt in such a way that it retains its meaning even if it's not read entirely.

One of the techniques for achieving this is duplicating the most important parts of your prompt. And there are others.

But still, overall, getting good results with one-shot grading is difficult and unpredictable, and therefore, a better option would be to ask follow-up questions.

When you ask the follow-up questions, the AI isolates the most relevant parts of the text, and reads them more thoroughly with the aim of finding the answer to your question.

This means that the AI is not skimming as much as it does in the initial run when it has a much longer text and a much less specific task.

The AI is searching and therefore going deeper, just like we, humans do.

Yet as we've already discussed, asking follow-up questions takes time and effort, which can negate the benefits you're getting from using the AI.

The good news however, is that this process can be automated.

And this is what Elagrade does for you.

With Elagrade, not only do you get the advantage of a polished initial prompt, but you also can specify a set of follow-up questions that the model will use to check itself before providing you with the final assessment.

All of this is in addition to other benefits such as the free renewable monthly quota, not having to retype your rubric, prepaid pricing, consistent grades over multiple runs, bulk grading of up to 100 papers at a time, and the results available in a single Word document report.

You can read more about how to use Elagrade for grading essays in this article called [***how accurate and reliable is an AI paper grader***](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-accurate-and-reliable-is-an-ai-paper-grader).

### Specialized essay graders are best, premium LLMs are good, and the free bots are for sadomasochists

In conclusion, it's possible to grade essays using ChatGPT for free, but you pay with your time and effort, which you can approximately quantify by multiplying the time you've spent on guiding the model with your hourly wage.

Therefore, it's better to use the premium version of the AI as it's much more capable than the free model.

That said, you will still have to guide it, albeit less, and copy-paste the output, dealing with inconsistent formatting, and risking mixing up the results.

So, instead, you might want to check out specialized grading software such as Elagrade, which lets you automate the follow-up process, grade assignments in bulk, and get the result as a single Word document report, which reduces the grading time of the whole class to several minutes.

Elagrade gives you 20 pages (10k words) free each month. And if you want more, you ***don't*** have to buy a subscription.

So try out both of the ways and choose what's better for you.

Happy grading.

## You may also like

[How To Grade Essays With ChatGPT](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-to-grade-essays-with-chatgpt)

[The Best Online Essay Grader For English Teachers](https://elagrade.com/blog/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers)

[How ELA Teachers Can Embrace AI Essay Grading to Meet Educational Demands](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading)

The short answer is no, the long answer is yes. In this article I'm discussing whether the AI is getting more stupid and what is the advantage of specialized software over ChatGPT for grading essays with AI.

Do Specialized Essay Graders Even Make Sense When You Can Grade Papers With ChatGPT For Free?


![essay grading with ai free using chatgpt](/images/chatgpt_banner-EyNj.webp)

Grading essays with ChatGPT is a great way to save 20-30 hours of time each month.

Given the constraints and high expectations placed on teachers today, automated grading is actually the only way to fulfill these obligations to the fullest.

In this guide, we'll cover how to do it for free using ChatGPT. It's a more manual method, but yeah, it's free.

Therefore, it's perfect for those who are willing to spend no more than 0 dollars on this activity.

The downside obviously is that the results have to be checked, which means you'll still have to do a lot of reading. This time, feedback reading.

And even though this setup kind of defeats the purpose of automated grading, it still saves you the effort of having to understand the convoluted text and come up with meaningful feedback from scratch.

In other words, editing is easier than writing.

And so, if doing some work seems okay, this guide is for you.

If, however, you want a done-for-you solution, with superior quality without having to lose time on manual copy-pasting and double-checking, check out our [**best online essay grader article**,](https://elagrade.com/blog/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers) where we discuss the different features of the specialized essay graders and how they're better than general LLMs like ChatGPT.

Back to the main subject.

## Grading Essays With ChatGPT Step-By-Step

To start scoring essays with ChatGPT you'll have to register first. So head over to <https://chat.openai.com> and sign up.

The default plan is free, and even though it's far worse than the paid one, if you agree to invest time in checking and refining, it's going to be sufficient.

So, we go with the free plan for now.

After registering, you'll find yourself on the chat interface that looks something like this:

![chat gpt interface](/images/chatgpt-iterface-AyNz.webp)

The colors of your screen might be white if you use the light theme in your browser.

**From now on, the process is simple.**

1\. You write an instruction where you tell the AI how you want it to grade the paper.

2\. Then you add the text of the essay to the instruction and paste the whole thing into the chat.

3\. The AI reads everything and tries its best to follow your instructions and give you the result you want.

4\. You check the result, and if the bot missed anything you ask it to correct it.

5\. You then combine all feedback and copy and paste it into a separate file for reference.

The steps #4 and #5 take the most of time.

That's because the free ChatGPT model often gets things wrong. But we've already said we're doing it for free, so we're sticking with it.

Now, we've said step #1 is giving instructions.

Here is a good template to get you started.

Replace the text within the \[square brackets\] with your own criteria:

`"You are an ELA Teacher. Your goal is to grade the essay after ### according to these criteria: 1. You prioritize [INSERT YOUR RUBRIC HERE] over [ANOTHER RUBRIC]. 2. You give detailed feedback on how each aspect of the essay could be improved with the references to the text. 3. You only use the information that exists in the text, don't make things up. 4. You grade on a scale from [INSERT YOUR GRADING SCALE]. 5. Think step-by-step.`

`###[INSERT THE ESSAY TEXT HERE]"`

Then paste the filled-in prompt into the chat and hit Enter.

![chatgpt essay grading interface](/images/chatgpt-interface-essay-grading-Y1MT.webp)

The result will look something like this:

![chatgpt interface with essay grading result](/images/chatgpt-iterface-essay-grading-result-I2ND.webp)

And even though it looks credible I strongly encourage you to read it and ask for clarification.

The free ChatGPT model is notorious for making lies look very trustworthy, so you never know it unless you fact-check it.

A good idea is to at least ask the "Are you sure?" question a few times. If the answers don't differ much, chances are that the bot is not lying.

![chatgpt essay grading interface fine tuting](/images/chatgpt-interface-essay-grading-fine-turning-cwOT.webp)

After you've checked the result copy it into a separate doc and keep it for your reference.

Since you're not grading the papers manually you want to keep the feedback you provide at hand to familiarize yourself in case the student or parents have questions.

This is exactly how you mark essays with AI, using ChatGPT.

As you can see it might get really tedious really fast because of the amount of copy-pasting and reading it involves.

That's why considering the cost of time and energy, it might be a better investment to use the paid ChatGPT plan (called ChatGPT plus) to avoid having to check feedback for 'hallucinations'.

Or even better, use a specialized tool such as Elagrade that can grade multiple papers in bulk and save them in a doc file for you, decreasing the amount of time required for grading the whole class to mere minutes.

We cover this in more detail in another article called [**how accurate and reliable the AI graders are**](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-accurate-and-reliable-is-an-ai-paper-grader).

Check it out if you want to learn more.

## You may also like:

[How To Start Grading Essays With AI](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-to-start-grading-essays-with-ai)

[The Best Online Essay Grader For English Teachers](https://elagrade.com/blog/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers)

[How ELA Teachers Can Use AI Essay Grading to Meet Educational Demands](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading)

[What AI Essay Grader For Teachers Is Easy To Use And Provides Feedback](https://elagrade.com/blog/what-ai-essay-grader-for-teachers-is-easy-to-use-and-provides-feedback)

Grading essays with AI is the best skill an English teacher can learn to boost productivity. And for those who are just starting out and want to grade essays free, doing this with ChatGPT might be a great choice. In this article, we explore how to do that step-by-step.

How To Grade Essays With ChatGPT


![An English teacher is grading an essay with AI](/images/elagrade-ai-essay-grader-teacher-robot-czMz.webp)

Since AI entered education English language teachers got a chance of getting a better work-life balance.

You can now outsource the most tedious task of essay grading to an essay grading software without having to waste your weekends and sick days on this mind-numbing activity you're not compensated for.

## Two Popular Ways Of Grading Essays With AI

There are 2 ways of using AI for essay scoring. The first is via general-purpose LLMs such as ChatGPT or Anthropic.

![](/images/openai-antrophic-M2OD.webp)

These platforms give you an intuitive interface where you can copy and paste the students' works, followed by the grading instructions you would like the model to apply.

The advantage of this method is that it's free.

Both ChatGPT and Anthropic have free versions with unlimited message quota.

The disadvantage, however, is that the free models often make mistakes because they have limited resources.

In grading essays, this translates into 'hallucinations' when the AI makes up information.

It can, for instance, say that something exists in the text when it doesn't or ignore something that is there as if it wasn't.

As you can guess, this can lead to additional Q&A sessions and calls from parents questioning the feedback and reasoning behind grading.

**That's why when using a free LLM such as the free version of ChatGPT for grading it's important to read the reasoning provided by the AI and check if it makes sense in the context of the paper.**

It also helps to ask the AI to grade the same paper several times and then combine all feedback.

This helps decrease the probability of the AI missing a point, as what is missed in one run will likely be caught in the subsequent rounds.

But as you can guess, this will easily turn into a time-consuming chore.

Not only you'll have to copy and paste the essays and instructions multiple times, but you'll have to read each feedback, combine it, and still check if everything makes sense.

That's why while it sounds attractive to use the free model at first glance, you quickly realize that you're actually paying much more with your time spent on checking the quality.

### The Best Approach To Scoring Papers With AI

That's why if you're serious about grading essays with AI, you should consider using a paid AI model or a specialized service that is based on a paid model of AI.

![](/images/0-chatgpt-and-elagrade-logos-E2Mz.webp)

We've covered this in detail in [How ELA Teachers Can Embrace AI Essay Grading to Meet Educational Demands](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading), but here's the gist:

When you upgrade to a paid plan of ChatGPT (called ChatGPT Plus), you get access to its most powerful model - the GPT 4.

Unlike the free model, it has a much stronger reasoning and almost never misses anything.

In fact, GPT 4 [surpassed humans in the USMLE soft skill assessments](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43436-9) (78% vs 86.4%) meaning that you can rely on its grading not less (if not more) than you could on a human assistant for helping you with grading.

**The downsides of GPT 4, however, are its price ($20/month), limited quota of 40 messages per 3 hours, and the fact that you still have to do a lot of copy-pasting and instruction prompting.**

Therefore, an even better option, both in terms of pricing and lower effort would be to use a specialized grading software based on the same AI model as the GPT 4.

We've compared 2 such options in the [best online essay grader for English teachers](https://elagrade.com/blog/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers), but here's the main point:

### The Advantages of A Specialized Essay Grader

A specialized essay grader (such as Elagrade) lets you save your grading criteria and upload the essays in bulk as files.

![elagrade essay grader interface](/images/6-elagrade-add-students-interface-UxND.webp)

It means you don't have to open each file and copy and paste it in the chat, and then back, which decreases the manual error rate and saves you a lot of time.

And most importantly, unlike GPT 4, Elagrade gives you 20 papers free each month, and if you need more, you can opt into the prepaid plan to pay only for what you use.

This means you could use a free version of GPT for your daily tasks such as brainstorming and lesson planning, and Elagrade for grading papers without the risk of hallucinations and having to pay a $20 monthly subscription.

To see it in action, head over to [elagrade.com](https://elagrade.com) and watch the short introductory video.

## You may also like:

[What Ai Essay Grader For Teachers Is Easy To Use And Provides Feedback](https://elagrade.com/blog/what-ai-essay-grader-for-teachers-is-easy-to-use-and-provides-feedback)

[How Accurate and Reliable is an AI Paper Grader](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-accurate-and-reliable-is-an-ai-paper-grader)

[Do specialized essay graders even make sense when you can grade papers with ChatGPT for free?](https://elagrade.com/blog/do-specialized-essay-graders-even-make-sense-when-you-can-grade-papers-with-chatgpt-for-free)

AI gives teachers an opportunity to have a better work-life balance. You can now outsource the most tedious task to an essay grading software without sacrificing the quality and wasting your time. And the best of all is that you can do it absolutely free. Check it out now.

How To Start Grading Essays With AI


![](/images/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers-gxmd-kyNj.webp)

AI essay grading is a new trend that makes life easier for English language teachers.

These are the tools designed to aid English teachers in their grading work - helping them meet educational demands and avoid unpaid labor on weekends and sick days.

## What Is Special About An Online Essay Grader For Teachers

An essay grading tool has a few critical differences that set it apart from the programs that just help write better.

**1. It focuses on analysis vs improvement**

The primary aim of an online essay grader is to grade, not improve the paper.

Improvement is what the student will have to do themselves after they get their feedback. Therefore, the interface should clearly display the grade instead of focusing on how to improve the paper.

**2. It lets you set your grading criteria (custom rubrics)**

A good online essay grader must support personal grading criteria. You should be able to tell it how you grade your papers so that it mirrors your personal grading style.

This is important when you need to assign more weight to some aspect of the writing, such as clarity or focus or maybe the student's ability to use the tenses correctly.

**3. It provides targeted feedback**

Students and parents expect specific feedback. If the teacher's remarks are broad and lack references they may hurt the credibility and turn into unnecessary Q&A sessions.

That's why a good AI essay grader for teachers should provide detailed feedback with direct references to the lines of text that it relates to.

A general essay improvement tool does not typically have this feature.

**4. It focuses on meaning, not only structure.**

Grading essays is more than just checking grammar and sentence structure. A good tool must understand the meaning and how different parts of the text relate to each other.

This involves using AI for text analysis, and more often than not is out of the scope of the general essay improvement tools.

## Identifying The Best Online Essay Grader

With these criteria in mind, let's filter out the tools that are not related to grading and compare those that are.

The following tools are great options for improving writing, but not grading essays.

They either lack the ability to set grading criteria, don't provide references to the lines of the text, or focus on the structure and word combination rather than the whole meaning of the paper.

### Tools That Aren't Meant For Grading

[- ProWritingAid Essay Checker](https://prowritingaid.com/essay-checker)

[- QuillBot Essay Checker](https://quillbot.com/essay-checker)

[- Grammarly Essay Checker](https://www.grammarly.com/essay-checker)

[- Online Essay Grader](https://www.onlineessaygrader.com/)

[- Edu Birdie Writing Tool](https://edubirdie.com/birdiedon-writingtool)

[- Paperrater](https://www.paperrater.com/proofreader)

These tools are excellent aids for writing.

As for the grading, the options we discuss further down are specifically designed for this task and provide a better value for the teachers.

### The AI Essay Grading Tools For Teachers

1\. [Elagrade.com](Elagrade.com)

**Benefits:**

\+ Has a free plan

\+ There are no additional limitations on the free plan

\+ Supports custom grading criteria (rubrics)

\+ Provides detailed feedback with references to lines

\+ Supports meaning analysis

\+ Supports handwritten text (photos), pdf, doc, and txt

\+ Provides prepaid payment option

\+ Supports grading papers in bulk on all plans

\+ The class report is available in a .doc file

**Limitations:**

\- Does not have AI detection

2\. [EssayGrader.ai](EssayGrader.ai)

**Benefits:**

\+ Provides a free plan with 10 essays/month (1000 words each)

\+ Offers AI detection starting from the pro plan ($19.99)

\+ Supports grading in bulk starting from the pro plan ($19.99)

\+ Provides detailed feedback with references to lines

\+ You can set your custom grading criteria (rubrics)

\+ Supports saving grading criteria to avoid retyping

**Limitations:**

\- The plans are limited by word count, the ability for bulk grading

\- Customer support is only available starting from the lite plan ($8.99)

\- Doesn't grade handwritten text

\- Does not offer a prepaid plan

### What about the elephant in the room?

Yes, you can use the ChatGPT for grading. But it requires having a premium (Plus) subscription for good results.

Otherwise the free version of ChatGPT is famous for making things up, a.k.a 'hallucinating', which can quickly turn into an embarrassing situation.

In addition ChatGPT being a versatile tool, requires some setup, fine tuning and quite a bit of manual work.

To learn more about about grading papers with ChatGPT read [**How ELA Teachers Can Use AI Essay Grading to Meet Educational Demands**](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading)

## Which Online Essay Grader Is Best?

As you can see, both Elagrade and EssayGrader support the critical requirements for grading essays.

These are:

1\. custom grading criteria,

2\. detailed feedback with line references,

3\. meaning analysis, and

4\. bulk grading

They also both offer free plans.

However, EssayGrader seems to be more restrictive when it comes to some important features.

For instance, it only offers bulk grading, and AI detection on its pro plan, as well as limits the length of the articles on the free and lite plans.

It also doesn't support handwritten text.

Elagrade, while lacking AI detection, offers grading in bulk on all of its plans, doesn't limit the length of the essays, and allows you to grade handwritten text by uploading pictures.

Lastly, Elagrade offers a complete freedom with the prepaid plan and unexpiring tokens.

Ultimately, the best decision would be to test both products and see which resonates with your needs more.

## You may also like:

[**How Accurate and Reliable is AI Essay Grading**](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-accurate-and-reliable-is-an-ai-paper-grader)

[**What AI Essay Grader For Teachers Is Easy To Use And Provides Feedback**](https://elagrade.com/blog/what-ai-essay-grader-for-teachers-is-easy-to-use-and-provides-feedback)

[**How ELA Teachers Can Use AI Essay Grading to Meet Educational Demands**](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading)

What online essay grader is best for ELA teachers and why? In this article we compare the AI essay grading software and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.

The Best Online Essay Grader For English Teachers


![English teacher is supervising a robot that is grading a paper](/images/how-accurate-and-reliable-is-an-ai-paper-grader-M0Nz.webp)

AI essay grading is becoming the new norm in education. The reason is simple - less effort, better results.

Not that long ago a teacher had to spend 5-10 minutes to grade one written assignment (typically 500 words).

Now, the AI does it within seconds.

And not only does it, but it catches every detail that often slips a tired teacher's attention on the 10th or 15th paper they read in a row.

But how reliable is grading essays with AI? Can you just hand the result to the student directly?

The answer is: "It depends". In particular, it depends on the model of the AI that you're using.

## The Best AI Essay Grader

Just like with everything, there are many models of AI out there. Some are free, most - not.

As a rule, the free versions are much less capable and prone to "hallucinations". A hallucination means that the AI makes things up. A good example is the free version of ChatGPT.

Here's an easy experiment to demonstrate it.

Ask ChatGPT something. Then follow up with the "Are you sure?" question.

Chances are that it'll start apologizing and give you an entirely different answer from the original one. That's a hallucination.

Ever had someone replying to you without paying attention and then apologizing? This is similar, but with AI.

When an AI hallucinates it may tell that you've said something you didn't. Or it may come up with a non-existing reference.

Many lawyers were caught by that in a very bad way. And teachers can get too if they use the free model of AI for grading assignments without checking the results.

Therefore, the bottom line is if you're using a free AI model for grading - check the results.

But what's the point of using the AI for grading papers if you then have to check the result anyway?

This is a valid point and that's why I don't recommend using a free version of ChatGPT for grading. It's just not good for this task.

What you should be using though, is a paid version of AI. In the case of ChatGPT, it's called ChatGPT Plus and it costs $20 a month.

But! There is a better alternative.

## The Problem With Using ChatGPT for Grading

The problem with ChatGPT Plus is that even though it's entirely capable of grading papers, it's not made for it. ChatGPT is designed for having conversations, not grading papers.

This means - you'll have to do a lot of copy-pasting and formatting.

Because each time you give it a new assignment it's likely to change something in the result. So you'll have to either tell it to modify the result or modify the result yourself, manually.

You'll also have to start a new conversation for each paper you are grading, to prevent it from referencing the previous papers from history.

As you can imagine, this can quickly become a chore for teachers with many students.

That's why a much better option for AI grading essays would be to use a service that is made for that.

A good example is Elagrade.

## An Alternative To ChatGPT for AI Paper Grading

Elagrade offers several advantages over ChatGPT.

1\. First, you can save your personal grading criteria. This means that you don't have to retype (or paste) it tens or hundreds of times in the interface.

You give your criteria once, save it, and it's used for grading your papers until you decide to change it.

![Elagrade add criteria grading interface](/images/elagrade-add-grading-criteria-AwNz.webp)

2\. Second, with Elagrade you can check many papers at the same time. Like tens and even hundreds of them.

That's not possible with ChatGPT.

There you have to upload every paper one by one and wait until each of them is finished being graded.

But before that, you also have to copy and paste the text into the interface. And then, copy and paste the result back from the interface.

This slows down the process quite a bit, especially for teachers with many students.

On the other hand, with Elagrade, you just drop all of the papers in bulk, and click "Grade".

No need to wait for each paper. No need to copy and paste the text.

![Elagrade ai grading essays in bulk](/images/elagrade-add-students-interface-A5NT.webp)

3\. The third advantage of Elagrade over ChatGPT is subtle but important.

When you copy tens of papers from ChatGPT into your Google or Word doc, there is a chance of messing up.

For example, you can copy the wrong feedback. As you can guess, this can easily translate into an embarrassing situation. Therefore, you'll have to check each text before copying and pasting. I.e. do the extra work.

And as you may have guessed, you don't have such a problem with Elagrade. When you use Elagrade, all results are readily available in a DOC file.

No need for copy-pasting. No room for errors.

## The Biggest Advantage Of Elagrade Over ChatGPT

4\. Lastly, the biggest advantage of Elagrade over ChatGPT is price.

While ChatGPT Plus is only available as a monthly subscription, Elagrade gives you a free plan, and if you need more, you can take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model.

For context, 10 additional pages cost just 50 cents with Elagrade.

This means that if you have a class of 30 students, your total monthly grading cost will be 50 cents (20 free and 10 additional pages).

And if you have 60 students the total monthly cost will be $2.

With ChatGPT this cost is 10 times higher.

But "I might use ChatGPT for other purposes too, like coming up with lesson plans for example" you might think.

That's right, but this is something the free version of ChatGPT is perfectly capable of doing.

That's because 'hallucinations' are only a problem when grading, but they're entirely harmless (and maybe even beneficial) when you have to brainstorm new ideas.

That's why using the free version of ChatGPT for brainstorming (like coming up with lesson plans) and Elagrade for grading will give you the best of two worlds: the cheapest service - with the best quality.

If you want to learn more about how to get started with ChatGPT or Elagrade check out [How ELA Teachers Can Embrace AI Essay Grading](how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading).

Alternatively, you can watch our [ai grading quick start video here](https://elagrade.com/#quickstart).

Whichever setup you end up choosing AI will save you a lot of time and energy. Depending on your schedule this could mean better work-life balance or more free time for the activities you love.

Whatever the positive effect ends up being for you, one thing is sure. It wouldn't have been possible without the AI transformation.

## You may also like:

[The Best Online Essay Grader For English Teachers](https://elagrade.com/blog/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers)

[How ELA Teachers Can Use AI Essay Grading to Meet Educational Demands](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading)

[What AI Essay Grader For Teachers Is Easy To Use And Provides Feedback](https://elagrade.com/blog/what-ai-essay-grader-for-teachers-is-easy-to-use-and-provides-feedback)

How good is the quality of grading with AI? Here we explore the advantages and disadvantages of using ChatGPT and the 4 advantages Elagrade has over ChatGPT for grading papers.

How Accurate and Reliable is an AI Paper Grader


![](/images/what-ai-essay-grader-for-teachers-is-easy-to-use-and-provides-feedback-i2ot-A5Nj.webp)

The AI essay grading is getting increasingly popular among ELA teachers.

There was an initial hesitancy due to the common fear of AI taking over everyone's jobs, but more and more people started realizing that AI can not just take jobs, but also help retain them.

This especially applies to English language teaching, particularly in low-income areas where many teachers quit for lack of a work-life balance due to the time consumed by grading, or to be exact - unpaid grading.

These teachers would not have lost their jobs, and the students would not have lost their teachers weren't the grading that excessively stressful.

And if AI can solve this problem, how can one question its effectiveness?

But what AI grading software is good and how to choose one?

This is what we’re going to explore in this article.

## What AI Essay Grader Is Good And How To Choose One?

The power of AI essay grading hinges on specific features of the software that cater to the teacher's needs.

These can be summarized as follows:

**It's easy to use**

An AI essay grader must be intuitive and user-friendly, allowing teachers to navigate and use its features, regardless of their tech savvy.

It should not require any thinking, because thinking takes effort and people who spend most of their time in the craze and noise of schools are usually quite tired by the time they get to grading.

**It supports personal style of grading**

Every teacher has a unique style of grading. Students remember this style and can often understand if their work has been graded by a different person.

Therefore, the AI grading software should support the specific style of grading the teacher wants it to adopt.

This includes the ability to grade by specific rubrics, as well as a custom definition of what is good/bad and important in writing according to the teacher’s opinion.

**It provides individual feedback**

Many teachers agree that grading without feedback is useless.

After all, it's there to stimulate students to do better, but if the student doesn’t know what to improve, what's the point in grading them in the first place?

Yet giving feedback to tens and hundreds of papers is not easy.

Not only does it take time to read all papers, but it also takes energy to comprehend them, especially in situations where a student’s writing is convoluted.

Therefore, not many teachers can do it, and those that can, can rarely do it well.

And so if the AI is here to help, it must be able to provide personalized feedback.

This feedback should reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the paper avoiding generic comments like "Needs improvement!" that are not only unhelpful but can also be demotivating.

Ideally, the feedback should include references to the lines of text, so that the teacher can easily check it and support themselves if a student asks for the justification.

Now, is there an AI grader that combines all of the points discussed above?

Is there one that is easy to use, supports the personal style of grading, and provides individual feedback line by line?

Yes there is!

## Elagrade - AI Essay Grading For Teachers

With Elagrade you give the AI your unique grading instructions and custom rubrics.

It then uses them to grade your students’ papers and provide detailed feedback focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of each paper.

![elagrade ai essay grader grading criteria interface](/images/4-elagrade-add-grading-criteria-kwnt-IwOT.webp)

Each feedback has a reference to the lines in the text so that you can back up your reasoning in case the student or parent asks for clarification.

![elagrade ai essay grading report example](/images/5-elagrade-grading-report-k0md-Y3NT.webp)

Elagrade grades tens and hundreds of papers in minutes saving each ELA teacher about 30 hours a month and thus helping them maintain a healthy work-life balance.

### Why not to grade with ChatGPT?

You might think, but can’t I grade with ChatGPT? After all, it's free, and you might already have an account there.

This is not quite true, because the free model of ChatGPT has superficial reasoning that leads to 'hallucinations'.

In short, it misses or misinterprets arguments and often makes non-existent claims.

You can learn more about this in another of our articles where we discuss [how English language teachers can use ai essay grading](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading).

## AI Grading is Becoming The New Norm

AI paper grading is becoming an indispensable tool in an ELA teacher's toolset.

Not only does it save time, but helps meet the grading and feedback demands of the district, students, and parents.

A good AI essay grader is simple to use, provides detailed feedback, supports the teacher's personal grading style, and ideally, allows grading multiple papers in bulk.

These are all of the [features Elagrade offers teachers for free](https://elagrade.com) helping them them maintain their health and sanity, and enhancing their students' learning experience.

## You may also like:

[How Accurate and Reliable is AI Essay Grading](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-accurate-and-reliable-is-ai-essay-grading)

[The Best Online Essay Grader For English Teachers](https://elagrade.com/blog/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers)

[How ELA Teachers Can Use AI Essay Grading to Meet Educational Demands](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-ela-teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading)

In this article we explore the essential features of an effective AI essay grader, highlighting the core functionality and crucial effect it has on both students and teachers. Read how AI essay grading helps retain educators, and improve student outcomes while meeting teaching standards and parents' demands.

What Ai Essay Grader For Teachers Is Easy To Use And Provides Feedback


![English teacher grading essays with AI](/images/how-english-language-arts--teachers-can-embrace-ai-essay-grading-to-meet-educational-demands-QyMz.png)

ELA teachers face an overwhelming workload.

Between crafting lesson plans, managing classrooms, and staying current with teaching trends, there's a big challenge that keeps them up into the night: grading essays.

It's a crucial part of a teacher's job, yet it consumes so much time. The demand for timely feedback is not just a necessity but a requirement by parents and school administrators.

They seek tangible evidence of the kid's progress, without taking into consideration its feasibility and most importantly the compensation the teachers should be awarded for having to spend their time on weekends and sick days to meet those demands.

Fortunately, there's a promising solution that is already in the lives of some, but not all teachers - the AI essay grading.

This technology is a beacon of hope, promising to ease the grading process while maintaining the quality of feedback provided to students.

In this article, we explore the 2 practical ways that ELA teachers can leverage AI essay grading to reclaim their time and meet pedagogical demands.

## How Is AI Grading Essays

What is fascinating about AI is that it doesn’t understand anything. Yet, it provides feedback that is extremely accurate and to the point - a true marvel of engineering.

At the heart of this technology is a process known as vectorization, which transforms letters into numbers and then computes their relationships. The result is a pattern that enables the AI to grasp the meaning of the text without understanding it in the traditional human sense - a concept that's nothing short of mind-blowing.

These mathematical relationships allow the AI to catch every nuance of writing, nuances that can often elude human attention or influence us, leading to potential bias.

This aspect is especially relevant for teachers who have a large number of students and therefore are tasked with grading dozens, if not hundreds, of written assignments and full-page essays that can numb the mind, especially when there are no breaks due to the limited time allocated to grading.

In these situations the efficiency brought by AI is transformative; it not only eliminates bias, but also elevates the caliber of feedback and affords teachers the opportunity for much-needed self-care and quality time, fostering a work-life balance, and boosting motivation in the demanding world of education.

## What AI Essay Grading Solutions Are There

There are two distinct ways in which ELA teachers can grade essays:

**1. Using ChatGPT**

**2. Using specialized grading tools such as Elagrade**.

![chatgpt and elagrade logos](/images/chatgpt-and-elagrade-logos-E4ND.webp)

1\. When using ChatGPT you have two options - a free and a paid one. The free option while cost-effective, produces inaccurate and inconsistent results.

The reason for this is that the AI model serving as the basis of the free program is trained on a small dataset and uses limited processing power, which results in its poor ability to comprehend and follow instructions.

That's why it often misses or misinterprets information, which is called 'hallucination.' For instance, it might overlook critical points or falsely identify arguments that don't exist.

In contrast, the paid version of ChatGPT is notably more robust. It deeply understands the meaning, almost entirely eliminating 'hallucinations.' This is a model you can truly entrust your grading to without being worried that it can add or remove something from the paper.

But regardless of which version of AI you're using, grading with ChatGPT involves manually copying and pasting essays into the chat and then transferring the responses back.

This method, while more efficient than grading manually, is still time-consuming and prone to errors.

For example, there's a risk of accidentally copying the wrong feedback from the chat when grading multiple papers, which is why it requires additional focus and effort to ensure the accuracy of results.

2\. Another popular way to grade essays with AI is by using specialized grading platforms, such as elagrade.com that offer a more streamlined way of uploading papers and downloading the results. For instance, Elagrade allows for bulk grading, eliminating the task of copying and pasting assignments.

This efficiency reduces the grading time from hours to minutes and removes the risk of errors often arising from distractions and daydreaming natural to humans.

Additionally, it presents the results in a structured report that can be downloaded with a single click as opposed to ChatGPT, where the responses are scattered across multiple conversations and must be copied one by one.

Elagrade comes with a prepaid pricing plan, making it a more comfortable solution compared to the paid version of ChatGPT, which is only available as a monthly subscription.

## A Practical Instruction To Grading Essays With AI

### Grading Essays With ChatGPT

To begin grading essays with ChatGPT, start by signing up at <https://chat.openai.com>

![chatgpt login screen interface](/images/1-chagpt-main-screen-gyND.webp)

Once logged in, navigate to the chat area where the actual interaction takes place. If you wish to use the paid plan, click on the option to upgrade in the bottom left corner of the chat. Then select the Plus plan and make a payment.

![chatgpt main screen interface](/images/2-chatgpt-main-screen-interface-g2Mj.webp)

After upgrading, select the premium version of the AI called GPT4 from the dropdown menu at the top.

![chatgpt select model interface](/images/3-chatgpt-select-model-dropdown-interface-MxNz.webp)

To grade an essay, you'll copy and paste the text into the chat area, along with your instructions for grading, specifying the criteria and which aspects to focus on.

If the result is poor, you can provide additional feedback and ask to refine the analysis. This iterative process usually ends in an accurate grading but takes time and effort to implement.

Once you're satisfied with the result, copy and paste the feedback into a separate document.

![chatgpt text in the input filed interface](/images/4-chatgpt-paste-essay-interface-g1OD.webp)

If you have multiple papers to grade, it's important to maintain consistency. Provide the exact same grading instructions for each paper to ensure uniform standards for all students.

You should also start a separate conversation each time you grade a new paper to prevent the AI from mixing the text or feedback from a previous student's essay.

To start a new conversation click the ChatGPT logo in the top left corner. This ensures that each paper is evaluated independently and the AI maintains the integrity of the grading process.

### Grading Essays In Bulk With Elagrade

The key advantage of Elagrade over ChatGPT is that it handles grading in bulk. It also lets you save your grading criteria, to avoid repetitive typing, copy-pasting, and the risk of providing wrong feedback.

This not only saves hours but makes grading consistent and saves time on double-checking the copied feedback for accuracy.

Under the hood, Elagrade uses the same premium version of ChatGPT Plus, without hallucinations, capable of conducting in-depth analysis and providing detailed personalized feedback to each student.

To start using Elagrade create a free account at <https://elagrade.com/sign-up>

![elagrade sign up screen interface](/images/1-elagrade-signup-screen-U2Mz.webp)

Then, confirm your email and you’re good to go. Grading with Elagrade is pretty intuitive.

You first give your assignment a name. After that, upload the students' papers, which can be in various formats like photos of the hardcopies, and PDF, DOC, or TXT documents.

![](/images/3-elagrade-add-students-interface-UwND.webp)

Each student is represented by a box. If you have multiple pages of a hard copy just take a photo of each page and upload it in the box.

Next, you add your grading criteria and then grade your papers based on it.

Adding your grading criteria is important as it allows you to infuse your personal style to make grading personal.

Setting the criteria is easy. Write a short sentence about what earns the highest and lowest grades. Then tell what you consider important, and finally add a few rubrics that you want the AI to use for feedback.

This tailored approach makes the AI adapt your grading style making it practically indiscernible from your manual grading.

![elagrade add grading criteria](/images/4-elagrade-add-grading-criteria-IzNT.webp)

Once you've set your criteria, click 'Save' followed by 'Grade'.

Within a few minutes, you will get a report in the docx format that includes grades, detailed explanations, and specific feedback for each student according to the rubrics line-by-line.

![elagrade grading report](/images/5-elagrade-grading-report-QwOT.webp)

Additionally, the report will show the class average and median grades for the assignment, allowing you to easily compare groups of students.

## Is It Ethical To Use AI For Grading

Ever since teachers started using AI for grading papers, there have been debates on its ethical implications.

Some people say that if students spend time writing an essay, teachers should put in the effort to read them. Even though this seems logical at first glance it overlooks the fundamental difference between writing and grading essays that is key to judging the ethical implications.

Writing an essay is an intellectual exercise for students, intended to develop their critical thinking and writing skills. Its importance lies in the process of writing, not the essay itself. That's why the students must invest time and effort, as this is how they grow intellectually.

On the other hand, the primary goal of grading is to provide objective and detailed feedback. How this feedback is generated is not important. What is important is that the students receive accurate, constructive feedback that guides them on how to improve their English language skills.

Therefore, there's no ethical dilemma in using AI for grading. The use of AI ensures that each student receives proper feedback, a goal that is challenging to achieve without AI.

In fact, there is actually an ethical concern in teachers not using AI for grading. This is obvious if you consider the trend of AI-generated essays that students spend minimal effort on writing yet the teachers have to spend hours on grading.

Using AI in this scenario allows teachers to protect their time and effort from having to read papers and write feedback that the particular students are not even reading or taking into consideration.

Therefore, the ethical question is more about students using AI for essay writing, while expecting teachers to grade them manually. Using AI by teachers for grading on the other hand aligns well with the educational goals of delivering thorough and unbiased feedback.

## AI As The Pillar Of Effective Grading

In conclusion, ELA teachers face a significant challenge in providing detailed, timely feedback on student essays while managing their ever-increasing workloads and maintaining work-life balance.

The AI essay grading gives a promising solution to this problem by providing accurate, unbiased feedback, and allowing teachers to reduce the risk of burnout.

With tools such as ChatGPT and grading platforms like Elagrade.com, teachers can choose between individual or efficient bulk grading.

While some people raise ethical concerns about the use of AI in grading, it is clear that only AI allows teachers to accomplish the primary objective of grading - providing timely constructive feedback to all students.

Therefore it is increasingly important for teachers to leverage this technology to preserve the integrity and efficiency of the feedback they provide.

## You may also like:

[How Accurate and Reliable is AI Essay Grading](https://elagrade.com/blog/how-accurate-and-reliable-is-an-ai-paper-grader)

[The Best Online Essay Grader For English Teachers](https://elagrade.com/blog/the-best-online-essay-grader-for-english-teachers)

[What AI Essay Grader For Teachers Is Easy To Use And Provides Feedback](https://elagrade.com/blog/what-ai-essay-grader-for-teachers-is-easy-to-use-and-provides-feedback)

AI essay grading using ChatGPT and Elagrade, presents an innovative solution to streamline this process, ensuring timely, detailed feedback for students while respecting teachers' work-life balance.