Grade a Worksheet Question by Question
Not one score for the sheet — a mark, a comment and the working behind it for every question on it. Typed or scanned, and you can change any of them before a student sees anything.
50 submissions a month on the free plan, any assignment type. Scanned paper included.
Twenty Questions, Thirty Students, Six Hundred Marks
An essay is one long act of judgement. A worksheet is six hundred small ones, and the small ones are worse — not harder, just relentless, and the twenty-third student’s question 14 gets a fraction of the attention the first student’s did. This is the assignment type where marking stops being reading and becomes clerical work, and it is the one most classes get every week.
Each Question Gets Its Own Mark, and Its Own Comment
GradingPal reads the worksheet, works out where each question is and what counts as a right answer, and then marks every answer individually against it. Question 7 gets a score, a comment, what the student did well and what to fix — four things, per question, per student.
And you mark it looking at the actual page. Open question 7 and the scan scrolls to question 7, highlighted, with the score beside it. No hunting back through a PDF for the answer a comment refers to.
Credit for Getting It Nearly Right
A student sets the problem up correctly, works through four steps and drops a minus sign in the third. Marked as an answer, that is a zero. Marked as a piece of work, it is most of the credit and one specific correction. GradingPal reads the working line by line, finds the step where it went wrong, and says so — and you decide in advance whether working shown earns credit at all.
“Your setup and first two steps are right. The sign flips in step three when you subtract — check that line and the rest follows.”
Typed, or a Stack Off the Printer
Worksheets done in a document come in as files. Worksheets done on paper come in as a scan — run a whole class on paper through the copier once as a single PDF and it splits into a submission per student before anything is marked. Both are graded the same way, question by question.
Afterwards, You Can See Which Question Broke
Marking every question separately means that when the set is finished you have a success rate for each one, colour-flagged — red usually means the whole class needs it again, amber a small group. And it shows which wrong answer they chose. Twenty students picking the same wrong option is a misconception you can name on Monday; twenty picking differently is a question that needs rewriting. That is what to teach tomorrow.
Change One Answer’s Comment Without Touching the Rest
Disagree with question 12 and you fix question 12. The other nineteen stay exactly as they were. You can also change one thing across the whole class at once — when you realise halfway through that everybody deserved the mark on question 6. See how the feedback is written.
Quizzes, Problem Sets and Exams
- Worksheets
- The weekly set. Short answers, calculations, labelled diagrams, fill-in-the-blank.
- Quizzes
- Low-stakes checks where what you want back is the class picture, not thirty individual verdicts.
- Problem sets
- Multi-step working from early algebra to university level, marked on the method as well as the answer.
- Exams and mock papers
- Longer, higher stakes, usually handwritten in a booklet — the same per-question marking, with more of it.
More on grading exams and mock papers.
What It Won’t Do
It won’t mark what it can’t read
An answer it cannot make out is flagged for you rather than guessed at, and flagged questions queue up so none becomes a mark you never made.
It won’t decide your marks per question
What each question is worth is yours to set.
It won’t penalise handwriting
Neatness is not a criterion unless you make it one.
It won’t release anything on its own
Every mark is a suggestion until you approve it, and nothing reaches a student until you share it.
Try It on One Set
50 submissions a month on the free plan — a class of thirty, three times over — with scanned paper, your own marks per question and every assignment type on this page. No credit card. See what each plan includes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it mark each question separately?
Yes — that is the whole point of it. Every question gets its own score, its own comment, and notes on what the student did well and what to fix, rather than one mark for the sheet. You can change any one of them without touching the others.
Can students get partial credit for their working?
Yes, and you decide whether they should. GradingPal reads multi-step working line by line and can identify the step where it went wrong, so a correct method with one slip is marked as that rather than as a wrong answer.
Can I grade worksheets my students did on paper?
Yes. Scan the class as one PDF and it splits into a submission per student, reads the handwriting and marks each sheet question by question. Photos work too, though a flat scan reads more reliably than one taken at an angle.
Will it tell me which questions the class found hardest?
Yes. Because every question is marked separately, you get a success rate for each one when the set is finished, colour-flagged, including which wrong answer students chose — which separates a shared misconception from a badly worded question.
What happens to an answer it can’t read?
It is flagged for your judgement rather than guessed at, and flagged questions queue up so that none of them quietly becomes a mark you never made.
Mark One Set, Question by Question
Twenty questions and thirty students, each answer marked on its own — and a success rate for every question when the set is done.