We Don’t Grade the Regents. We Grade the Twenty Essays Before It.
Scoring the exam is yours, to the state’s rubric, with your department. The argument essays and text-analysis responses your students write between September and June are the ones nobody helps with — and marked against your rubric with NGLS tagged, they are also the ones that tell you what to teach next.
You approve every tag and every mark. Standards are optional — everything else works without them.
New York’s Standards, and the Exams They Lead To
The Next Generation Learning Standards are New York’s own set for English and mathematics; science sits under NYSSLS. What makes New York unusual is the Regents examinations — subject exams that carry a diploma requirement, with published task types and published rubrics. And unlike most state tests, their written responses are marked locally, by teachers, rather than by the state. NGLS and the Regents system in full are covered in our complete guide.
The Task Types Your Students Write All Year
New York’s task types are named and published, which means students practise the same handful of them from September onwards. That repetition is what makes consistent marking hard, and it is exactly what a rubric is for.
- Argument essays from sources
- NGLS writing standards, English
- Text-analysis responses
- Reading and writing indicators together
- Enduring issues and document-based essays
- Global history, with a stack of documents
- Civic literacy essays and short responses
- US history and government
- Science and maths constructed responses
- NYSSLS and NGLS mathematics
Tag Once. Every Grade After That Builds the Picture.
Pick NGLS for the class once, at the start of the year. On any rubric, each criterion has a suggest action — GradingPal proposes the matching standards and you accept or dismiss each one. Mark the work as usual. The evidence lands against the code, so a standard is not a checkbox but a list of the things students actually wrote. Across a term, that becomes a picture of where a class is against each standard.
The Exam Is Yours. The Practice Is the Workload.
When the Regents comes round, the marking is done by teachers, to the state’s rubric, in your department. GradingPal has no part in that and should not. What it has a part in is everything before: the argument essay set in October, the one in December, the two in February, the mock in April. Same task type, same rubric, thirty students, twenty times.
That repetition is where consistency quietly goes. It is hard to mark an argument essay in April the way you marked one in October — not because anyone is careless, but because a rubric held in your head drifts over eight months. Marking against a written rubric, with the same criteria applied every time, is the whole point: a student who improves should see the mark move because the writing moved, not because it is April.
And because each piece is tagged to the NGLS standards it assesses, the run of them says something a single mark cannot — which standards a class has actually demonstrated, and in which specific pieces of writing.
Before Your District Can Say Yes: Education Law 2-d
New York is the only state where the procurement question has its own statute. Education Law 2-d governs what a vendor must agree to before a district can share student data with it — a signed agreement, a data-security plan, and the parents’ bill of rights supplement. No New York district can adopt a tool without it, and a teacher who starts a trial without knowing that is going to be stopped later rather than sooner.
GradingPal has all three. We sign the Education Law 2-d agreement, we maintain the data-security plan it requires, and we provide the parents’ bill of rights supplement — ask us and we will send them, before a trial rather than after it. If you are comparing vendors, what a district must ask a vendor for is set out as a checklist your administrator can work through — and it is worth running us through it too. How we handle student data is documented in full, and what your district will need to approve it covers the rest of the route.
What This Doesn’t Claim to Do
It does not predict how a student will do on a state test. It does not replace your district’s reporting. It does not certify that your rubric is correctly aligned — you tag the criterion, and GradingPal records the alignment you set. And a teacher approves every mark before it counts.
It does not score Regents examinations, produce a Regents score, or apply the state’s scoring rubrics. That work belongs to your department and stays there. And nothing here is trained on New York’s exams. GradingPal marks against the rubric you write, in your wording — the same mechanism in every state.
One Task Type, October to May
- The task
- The source-based argument essay, set five times across the year.
- The rubric
- The department’s own, four criteria, written once.
- The tags
- The NGLS writing standards each criterion assesses, suggested and approved.
- October
- The first set marked, evidence lands.
- May
- Five sets in, and one student’s run against a single criterion reads as a line rather than five separate marks.
Then the exam comes, and your department marks it — knowing exactly which students had been climbing and which had plateaued in February.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can GradingPal score Regents exams?
No. Regents constructed responses are marked by teachers, to the state’s rubric, and that stays with your department. GradingPal marks the practice work students do through the year — argument essays, text-analysis responses, enduring issues essays — against the rubric you write.
Does it support the Next Generation Learning Standards?
Yes. Pick NGLS for a class once and tag rubric criteria to the standards you teach; everything you mark afterwards builds evidence against them. Science sits under NYSSLS, which is carried as its own set.
Can it mark enduring issues and civic literacy essays?
Yes — against your rubric, like any extended writing with sources. Those task types are long and repetitive to mark, which is exactly where consistent criteria help most. It does not apply the state’s scoring guides.
Is the AI trained on Regents formats?
No. GradingPal marks against the rubric you write, in your wording, and that mechanism is the same in every state. Nothing about it is tuned to a particular examination.
What does my district need for Education Law 2-d?
Three things: a signed agreement covering student data, a data-security plan, and the parents’ bill of rights supplement. No New York district can adopt a tool without them, and GradingPal provides all three — ask us and we will send them. There is also a checklist your administrator can work through, and our data handling is set out on our security page.
Will using this improve our Regents pass rate?
We would not claim that, and be cautious of anything that does. What it gives you is a clearer view of which standards students have demonstrated in the work you set, and more specific feedback returned faster. What that produces is the teaching, not the tool.
Grade One Assignment Free
Mark one set of argument essays against your own rubric, with NGLS tagged, and see what the run of them says by February.