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.

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 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.

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 helping them them maintain their health and sanity, and enhancing their students' learning experience.

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