How to Use AI
for Grading
A step-by-step teacher’s guide. AI grading tools don’t replace teacher judgment — they eliminate the tedious parts.
Done well, AI-assisted grading doesn’t reduce quality — it improves it.
The idea of an algorithm assigning final grades to student work raises legitimate concerns about validity, fairness, and the devaluation of teacher expertise. But modern AI grading tools don’t work that way. The best implementations use AI as a grading assistant — doing the time-consuming analytical work of evaluating student work against a rubric, and presenting suggested scores for the teacher to review, accept, adjust, or override. The teacher makes every final decision. The AI saves hours of initial analysis, freeing teachers to focus on feedback that matters.
"Teachers spend less time on data entry — and more on meaningful feedback."
— The core promise of AI-assisted grading
The Process
Five steps to
AI-assisted grading.
Design or generate your rubric
Everything starts with a clear rubric. If you don’t have one, Secondary AI’s rubric generator can produce a complete analytic rubric from your assignment description in under a minute. Define your criteria, performance levels, and descriptors for each cell. The more specific your rubric, the more useful the AI’s suggestions will be.
Assign work through an AI chatbot
Rather than collecting written submissions, you assign the topic through a configured AI chatbot. Students engage in a guided conversation — the AI asks questions, students respond, reason aloud, and demonstrate their understanding. This conversation becomes the “submission.” It captures not just what students know, but how they think.
Review AI-generated session insights
After each student completes their session, the AI generates a plain-English summary: what the student understood well, where they struggled, notable moments of insight or confusion, and an assessment of each learning outcome. Read summaries instead of re-reading entire transcripts for every student.
Apply AI-suggested rubric scores
Open the grading view alongside the student’s rubric. The AI suggests a score and performance level for each criterion based on the conversation. You can accept suggestions with a single click, adjust the score, or override entirely. For each criterion, you can read the AI’s rationale — which specific moments in the conversation informed its suggestion.
Add personalized feedback
The AI provides a draft feedback comment based on the session summary. Use this as a starting point, but always add your own voice. Reference specific moments in the conversation. This is where your expertise and relationship with the student matters most — and it’s the part that now takes minutes instead of hours.
Common Concerns
Addressing what teachers actually worry about.
Does AI grading introduce bias?
All grading involves some bias. AI grading tied to explicit rubric criteria is often more consistent than human grading across 30 submissions completed at varying times of day. The key is clear rubric criteria and teacher review of every suggested score.
Will students game the AI?
In a chat-based format, gaming is much harder than with written submissions. The AI asks follow-up questions that probe understanding. Students can’t paste in a Wikipedia answer — they have to engage with the conversation.
Can I use AI grading for high-stakes assessments?
We recommend AI-assisted grading for formative and low-stakes assignments first. For high-stakes assessments, use AI suggestions as a check on your own grading rather than a starting point.
What happens to student data?
On Secondary AI, student data is never used to train AI models. Chat sessions are stored securely under your account and can be deleted at any time.
Start Using AI for Grading Today
Secondary AI’s full grading workflow — rubric generator, session insights, AI scoring — is free to start.
See the Grading Tool