One essay per file, and the 8-page limit
Updated 19 September 2026
What to do with a class in one file
- Split it before uploading
- Any PDF tool will do it, including the preview app on most machines. One file per student, named however you like: the name on the row is only a label until the paper is graded and the name on the page takes over.
- Or scan one student at a time
- Slower at the scanner, faster afterwards, and it removes the step where a page ends up in the wrong student’s essay.
- Photographed essays: merge the rows
- Photograph everything in order, then fold each page into the row above it until one row holds one essay. Merging refuses to go past the eight-page limit.
Why the refusal is worth having
A grading tool that quietly guesses is worse than no tool, because nothing looks broken. This limit, the flag on handwriting it cannot read, and the refusal of a photo too small to read are all the same rule applied in three places: where it cannot be sure, it says so rather than producing a confident answer.
It is also the thing worth testing on any grading tool you are weighing up, this one included. Hand it something it should not be able to handle and see whether it tells you.
What this will not do
There is no automatic splitter for essays. Not an oversight. Essays vary in length student by student, so any fixed grouping would cut some of them in the middle, and a paper cut in half scores badly for a reason that has nothing to do with the writing.
Photographed essays arrive one row per photo. Twenty-five photos of a three-page essay each are twenty-five rows, not eight essays. Merge them into per-student rows before grading.
Thirty essays per batch. Beyond that you are asked to grade what is there first. Nothing is dropped quietly.
The limit is pages, not words. A very long typed essay is fine: typed submissions have no pages at all. The limit only binds on photos and PDFs.
Common questions
Why was my PDF refused for having too many pages?
Because one file is one student’s essay, and an essay can run up to 8 pages. The message names the file and its page count and says what to do: if that file holds a whole class, split it and upload one file per student. It is refused rather than partly graded on purpose.
Why not just grade the first 8 pages?
Because that is the worst thing it could do. Three students’ work fused into one paper comes back looking completely normal: a real score, real feedback, real notes, all of it wrong, and nothing on screen suggesting anything went amiss. A refusal is visible. A silent misread is not.
Can it split a scanned stack of essays for me?
Not for essays. A worksheet stack splits cleanly because every student’s paper is the same length, so you can say how many pages each one runs. Essays are not like that: one student writes four pages and another writes seven, so a fixed group size would cut them in the wrong places. Splitting the file yourself is the reliable route.
I photographed the essays. Each one is three pages. What happens?
Each photo arrives as its own row, because one file is one student by default. Use the merge control to fold a page into the row above it until each row holds one student’s essay. It refuses to merge past the eight-page limit, which is the same rule from the other direction.
How many essays can I grade in one batch?
Thirty. Adding more says so rather than quietly dropping them, and the extra files are simply not added.
Does the same limit apply to worksheets?
One worksheet is also up to 8 pages, but the worksheet screen handles a class set differently: give it a PDF and it asks how many pages each student’s paper runs, then splits the stack into papers of that size. That is a separate page.
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