Free AI essay grader for teachers
NudgeLearn Grader is free for 20 graded items a month, with no card. Upload a class set of essays, typed or photographed off paper, pick a state or Common Core writing rubric or write your own, and each essay comes back scored criterion by criterion with the marks on the student’s own page. You review every score before anything reaches a student. There are other free AI essay graders and some have larger free tiers than ours; the table below lists what each one actually includes, checked on 22 August 2026.
Free tiers compared
The honest version, including the tools whose free tier is bigger than ours. Every cell was read off that vendor’s own pricing page on 22 August 2026.
| Tool | Free tier | What it covers | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| NudgeLearn Grader | 20 graded items a month, forever | Essays and worksheets from one allowance, typed or handwritten | An essay bills by length: one item per 500 words, or per page, whichever is larger |
| CoGrader | Starter: 100 student submissions a month | Essays against a rubric, with Google Classroom, Canvas and Schoology integrations | Their help centre states handwritten image grading excludes visuals, diagrams, charts and graphics |
| EssayGrader.ai | Basic: 50 essays a month | Essays only, with a large rubric library | A 1,000-word cap per essay on the free tier |
| Class Companion | Free for teachers | AI feedback on written responses across subjects | School and district pricing is not published |
| MagicSchool AI | Free forever for an individual teacher | 80+ teacher tools including Writing Feedback and report-card comments | Unlimited generations and output history are on the paid Plus plan |
| Brisk Teaching | Educator Free: free forever, unlimited usage | A Chrome and Edge extension that gives feedback inside Google Docs and your LMS | Free runs their standard models; Premium and Intelligence are custom quotes |
| Gradescope | Gradescope Basic: free | Dynamic rubrics, question-by-question grading, PDF uploads, data export | Their pricing page lists AI-Powered Grading under the paid Institutional plan |
| Turnitin | None published | Similarity checking and feedback tools, licensed to institutions | No published price; every plan question routes to their sales team |
Sources, all vendor pages, checked 22 August 2026: CoGrader pricing · EssayGrader pricing · Class Companion plans · MagicSchool pricing · Brisk Teaching plans · Gradescope pricing · Turnitin Feedback Studio. Prices in this category move; check the vendor’s own page before deciding. All product names and trademarks belong to their owners, and NudgeLearn is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
What you get on the free tier
- The same grading engine as the paid plans. Free is a volume limit, not a weaker model. Twenty graded items a month, resetting on the first.
- Typed or handwritten. Paste the text or photograph the pages. Handwritten essays are read from a phone photo, and anything genuinely unreadable is flagged for you rather than guessed at.
- A real rubric, scored criterion by criterion. 56 built-in state and national writing rubrics, or write your own. Each criterion gets its own band and its own reason.
- Marks on the student’s own page, in plain English a student can act on, rather than a score and a paragraph of generalities.
- Your override on everything. Change any score, edit any comment, and nothing reaches a student until you release it.
What the paid tiers add is volume and the classroom scaffolding around it: class rosters, a saved rubric library, per-student and per-class analytics, gradebook and CSV export, and Google Classroom and Canvas sync. See the plans.
What free AI essay grading does not do
- It does not replace you. It marks a first pass; the grade is yours, and every score is editable before release.
- It is not a plagiarism or AI-writing detector. We do not do similarity checking and nothing here substitutes for a tool that does.
- It will not read every page. Faint pencil, heavy crossing-out and photos taken at an angle all cost accuracy, which is why unreadable answers are flagged rather than marked wrong.
- We hold no SOC 2 certification. Institution plans are FERPA and COPPA aligned with a custom data processing agreement; if your district requires a certification we do not have, that decides it, and we would rather say so here than at the end of a procurement call.
- There is no published accuracy benchmark for math yet. The measured figures on our accuracy page are for essays, and the page says so rather than implying more.
Free AI essay grading, answered
Is there a genuinely free AI essay grader for teachers?
Yes, several. NudgeLearn Grader is free for 20 graded items a month with no card, and it grades typed and handwritten essays against a real rubric. CoGrader Starter is free for 100 student submissions a month, EssayGrader.ai Basic is free for 50 essays a month with a 1,000-word cap, Class Companion is free for teachers, and MagicSchool and Brisk Teaching both have free-forever educator plans. Which is best depends on whether your essays arrive typed or on paper.
How many essays does the NudgeLearn free tier actually cover?
Twenty graded items a month. An essay bills by length rather than by file: one item per 500 words, or one per page, whichever is larger. So twenty short in-class responses cost twenty items, while twenty 1,500-word research essays cost sixty. Worksheets and essays draw on the same allowance, and the counter resets on the first of each month.
Does the free tier grade handwritten essays?
Yes. There is no feature difference in the grading itself between free and paid: photograph the pages with a phone and each essay comes back scored criterion by criterion on the rubric you chose, with the marks on the student’s own page. What the paid tiers add is volume, class rosters, your own saved rubric library, per-student analytics and gradebook export.
Do I need a credit card to start?
No. The free tier needs an account so your graded papers stay tied to you, and nothing asks for payment details until you choose to upgrade.
Is the AI doing the grading, or am I?
You are. It marks a first pass and explains what it marked, and you review it: change any score, edit any comment, and nothing reaches a student until you release it. It is built to save the hour of red pen, not to take the judgement off you. Anything it cannot read clearly is flagged for you rather than guessed at.
How accurate is free AI essay grading?
Ours is measured and published rather than asserted. Against 78 real student essays that Texas released with official examiner scores, nine in ten came back within one point of the examiner and quadratic weighted kappa was 0.78, against 0.70 as the commonly accepted bar for an automated marking system. The full method, sample and limits are on our accuracy page. Most tools in this category publish no benchmark at all, so treat an unsourced accuracy percentage as marketing.
What rubrics can I grade against for free?
Any of the 56 state and national writing rubrics in the built-in library, or one you write yourself. Free and paid see the same library; the paid tiers let you save your own rubrics and reuse them across classes.
Grade three real essays before you trust it with a class set
Free for 20 graded items a month. Pick papers you have already marked and check whether it agrees with you.
Start grading freeRelated
- How to grade 100 essays fast: the method, and how long it really takes.
- AI grading for handwritten work: photograph the page, get it back marked.
- Every AI grading tool compared: head to head, with each vendor’s real price.
- Writing rubric library and printable worksheets: free, no account.
- Step-by-step math lessons: free to use and to assign.