Grading essays – teacher's guide

1 Creating an essay assignment

Before grading you need an essay assignment. It is created in a course topic: open the course for editing and the Topics tab, choose the topic’s ✍️ Essay card and press “+ Add essay assignment”.

Course→ Topic→ ✍️ Essay→ + Add essay assignment

An essay assignment in the topic Extreme values: title, instructions with the formatting bar, grading mode, max points, type, deadline and lock. Below, the topic’s task cards.

Title – the name of the essay assignment.
Instructions for the student – an optional task prompt. Above the field is a formatting bar: B (bold), I (italic), U (underline), • List, 🔗 Insert link and ⊘ (remove link). To add a link, first select the text the link should go on.
Grading – Points (default) or Approved / rejected. An approved / rejected essay is not scored: the max points field is hidden, and instead of points the grading bar has the buttons Approved · Needs revision · Rejected (section 9). An approved essay counts towards the student’s course progress but does not add to the course points.
Max points – the maximum number of points for a points assignment.
Type – Essay, Summary or Learning journal.
Deadline + 🔒 Lock after deadline – prevents late submissions.
🗑 Remove essay assignment and ↔ Move to another topic – when the assignment is moved, the students’ submissions go with it.

When students submit essays to this assignment, they appear for grading in the Essays view (section 2).

2 The Essays view and submissions

Essay grading starts from the Essays view (in the Add tools menu). You see a list of submissions and can filter, sync and open a single essay for checking by clicking its row.

The Essays list (All): student, course, assignment, title, status, version, submission time and points. Linnea’s revised version v2 with v1 dimmed below it.

Filters – the course selection (All courses or one course) and Pending / Evaluated / All. Pending shows the statuses Submitted and Needs revision, Evaluated shows approved and rejected essays.
Sync – fetches new submissions from the cloud.
📥 Import essay – add an essay manually (course, assignment or a new assignment, student number, essay title and content).
Statuses – Submitted Needs revision Approved Rejected. For an approved / rejected assignment the Points column shows a dash.
Version – in revision rounds the same essay gets a new version (v1, v2, …). Older versions are shown indented below the newest one.
✕ at the end of a row deletes the submission permanently (you are asked to confirm).

3 Opening an essay for checking

Opening a submission takes you to the essay checking tool. The top bar has ← Back, the essay title, student, assignment, version and status. The essay text is on the left and the grading tools are in tabs on the right. Finally, you give the grade and feedback in the grading bar at the bottom (section 9).

The checking view: the essay text with comment highlights on the left, the Comments tab on the right, the grading bar at the bottom.

Comments – comments and highlights (section 4).
AI analysis – analysis of AI indicators (section 5).
Checks – plagiarism check, comparison with saved essays and the author profile (sections 6–7).
Writing log – writing summary, timeline and writing process replay (section 8). The tab is shown only if the submission has a writing log.

4 Commenting and highlights

The core of grading is commenting on the text. Select text with the mouse and a comment form opens: write the comment, choose a tag (or several) and press Add comment. The passage gets a colour-coded highlight, and the comment appears in the Comments list on the right.

The comment form next to a selected paragraph: the selected text, the comment and the tags by category (Missing source and Suspected plagiarism chosen).

The app comes with default tags (colour-coded):

Positive: Good argument, Good language.
Needs fixing: Missing source, Unclear, Structural error, Repetition.
Suspicion: Suspected plagiarism, Suspected AI use.
Structure: Good structure, Introduction/conclusion.

With the Tags button you can create your own tags (name, colour and category – including “Other”). Save saves the comments in the essay; they are sent to the student with the grading. You can delete a comment (“Delete comment”).

5 AI indicator analysis

The “Analyse AI indicators” button on the AI analysis tab makes a heuristic analysis of how likely it is that the text was produced by AI. The result is indicative – not conclusive proof.

AI analysis: the essay language, the risk gauge (0–100), the risk level and confidence, the reasons and the individual metrics.

Essay language – choose the language of the essay next to the button (defaults to the user interface language); the analysis uses language-specific word lists.
Risk level – Low / Moderate / High risk, plus the confidence and any contradiction between the metrics.
Reasons – which features raise (↑) or lower (↓) the estimate.
Metrics – for example sentence length uniformity, vocabulary diversity, repetitive structural patterns, paragraph structure consistency, overuse of transition words, formulaic phrases, predictability profile and lack of personal pronouns. Show description explains what a metric means.

Important: the result is a heuristic estimate, not proof. The final judgement is always the teacher’s. A short text does not give a reliable estimate.

6 Author profile (stylometry)

The “Check author” button on the Checks tab compares the essay’s writing style with the same student’s earlier essays (also on other courses). If the style differs clearly from the student’s usual style, it may indicate that the text was not written by the same person. Profiling needs at least two earlier essays.

Author profile: the result and reliability, the similarity of the feature groups and the largest deviations from the profile.

Compared features – sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation, structure, language features, character level and function words. Show all features opens the full list.
Result – Consistent with earlier style, Slight deviation or Clear deviation, with the similarity as a percentage.
Deviations from the profile – the features where the essay differs most from the student’s typical style (slight / significant / major).
Reliability – increases the more earlier essays from the student there are to compare with.

The author profile is an indicative measure – not an automatic decision about the author.

7 Plagiarism check

On the Checks tab the essay is compared in two directions: with web sources (Plagiarism check) and with the other essays in the system (Compare with saved).

Plagiarism check: the summary, the fingerprint fragments (the first one opened with its source) and the comparison with saved essays.

Plagiarism check – picks rare text fragments (fingerprints) from the essay, searches for them on the web, fetches the content of the sources found and compares it with the essay. Progress is shown step by step (e.g. “Searching fragment 2/4”). Result: No significant matches / Some matches found / Significant matches.
Fingerprint fragments – open a fragment to see the source where the same text appears and the matching passage. If the search stopped after a strong match, Check the remaining fingerprints continues.
Compare with saved – compares the essay with all other essays stored in the teacher app (including other students’ submissions) using a SimHash fingerprint and shows the similarity essay by essay.

Web search via the school server. From September 2026 the plagiarism check’s web search runs via the school server, so you do not need your own search service key. If the search fails, the result shows the message “The web search failed. Check the network connection…”. In that case, check the network connection and run the check again; if the problem persists, contact the administrators.

8 Writing log and writing process replay

The Writing log tab shows how the essay came about. It collects the events of the student’s writing log: typing activity, pauses, text snapshots, leaving the window and especially pasted text. This helps you spot, for example, content pasted in one go (possibly copied from elsewhere).

Writing summary

At the top of the tab is the Writing summary, which gives you the overall picture at a glance.

Typed by student / Pasted – how much of the final text the student typed and how much was pasted. The pasted share is shown in orange in the bar.
Pastes, Pauses (≥ 1 min), Left the window, Sessions – how many times text was pasted, how many pauses of over a minute there were (and their length), how many times the student left the writing window, and in how many separate writing sessions the essay was written.
Typing speed and Snapshots – the average speed (words/min) and how many interim saves of the text there are.

Timeline

Below the summary is the Writing process summary (writing time excluding pauses over 5 minutes – the same as in the replay –, number of events, start and latest event) and a timeline where the log events are shown in chronological order, grouped by day.

Typing activity – typing speed (words/min), words added (or removed) and the total word count.
Text pasted – when and how many words were pasted at once. A large single paste may be worth checking.
Window lost focus / Window regained focus – when the student left the writing window and came back.
Pause, Text snapshot and Session started / ended – the rhythm of writing and the interim saves (snapshots) with their reasons.

Writing process replay

▷ Replay writing process opens a window where you see the essay take shape one snapshot at a time, like a video. Added words are shown in green and deleted ones briefly in red strikethrough, so you see what the student wrote, deleted and edited.

▷ Play / Pause – starts and stops the replay (also the space bar).
Back to start and ‹ / › – go back to the start or move to the previous or next snapshot (also the arrow keys ← →).
Speed – replay speed from 5× to 300× the real writing time.
Time, Words, Snapshot – the clock time, the word count and which snapshot is showing; in brackets the reason the snapshot was saved (e.g. paste, typing pause, timer).
Timeline – click the timeline to jump to the point you want. Pauses of over a minute are compressed, so long pauses do not stretch the replay.

Note: the replay needs text snapshots, which are saved from student app version 9/2026 onwards. Older submissions cannot be replayed afterwards – the button is then greyed out. The summary and timeline still work.

The writing log complements the AI and author profile analyses: together they give a picture of whether the text was written by the student or brought in from elsewhere. Pasting alone does not prove cheating – the student may, for example, move their own text from another program.

9 Grading and returning

When you have commented on and checked the essay, you give the grade and feedback in the grading bar at the bottom. The buttons depend on the assignment’s grading mode (section 1): in a points assignment you give points, in an approved / rejected assignment you choose Approved, Needs revision or Rejected.

Points assignment

Approve and give feedback: points, feedback for the student and Send evaluation.

✓ Approve and give feedback – opens the points field and the feedback field. Send evaluation marks the essay Approved and sends the points, feedback and comments to the student.
Points – in whole or half points (e.g. 9.5). The student sees the points in their own essay next to the feedback and comments.
↺ Return for revision – write in the field what needs to be added or fixed; Return to student marks the essay Needs revision and sends the comment. The student revises the essay and submits a new version (section 10).
Cancel closes the form without sending.

Approved / rejected assignment

In an approved / rejected essay the grading bar has no points field but three buttons:

✓ Approved – no points; feedback is optional. Send evaluation marks the essay Approved and sends the feedback and comments. An approved essay counts towards course progress but does not add to the points.
↺ Needs revision – write what needs to be added; Return to student marks the essay Needs revision. The student revises the essay and submits a new version.
✕ Rejected – rejecting requires feedback: the Reject the work button is enabled only after you have written why the work is rejected. The essay is marked Rejected and the student cannot resubmit it; they are told to contact the teacher.

You can change the result later. Open the essay again (Evaluated filter) and choose a new result – for example, a rejected work can be returned for revision if you agree on it with the student.

10 Versions and the revision round

An essay returned for revision gets a new version when the student submits the revised text. When you open the newest version, the top bar has a 🔧 Tools / 📄 Previous version switch that shows the versions side by side.

Previous version: the new version v2 on the left, v1 (returned for revision) with its comment highlights on the right.

Submitted (v1)→ Needs revision→ Submitted (v2)→ Approved

Versioning – each revision round produces a new version (v1, v2, …). Comments and highlights are kept with the version.
Side-by-side view – hover over a highlight to see the earlier comment. If there are several earlier versions, choose the one to compare from the menu. Tools brings back the checking tool.
Approved – when the essay is in order, you approve it and the revision round ends.

🧩 See also: Topics →