Preparing a rubric

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A rubric tells grAider what to look for and how to award points. Prepare it before uploading student work. You can have grAider draft criteria from your teaching materials, write them yourself, or combine both approaches. Always review the finished rubric: the AI drafts it, and you decide whether it reflects your marking.

Select your assessment and choose Manage rubric to reach Edit rubric. The page follows three steps: Upload context documents, Extract rubric criteria, and Review rubric items. The help icon beside the heading opens a short introduction.

Gather useful grading guidance

Good starting materials include the task sheet, an answer key, model answers, solution notes, and your point or deduction rules. Include acceptable alternative answers and any constraints students were expected to follow.

Make expectations concrete. For example, “Award 2 points for the correct formula and 1 point for the substitution; deduct 1 point if the final answer has no unit” is more useful than “Check the calculation.” Smaller, focused criteria are easier to review than one broad criterion covering an entire exam.

Add documents or paste text

To upload files from your computer:

1. Select Upload files.
2. Select Upload from this device.
3. Choose one or more files. Supported formats are PDF, DOCX, PNG, JPG/JPEG, and WebP. Each file can be up to 25 MB.
4. Watch the document list while grAider uploads the files and reads their text. Pending and Reading text mean work is still in progress.

You can also select Paste text from clipboard, paste your guidance into Paste text, and choose Add document. Pasted text becomes a context document immediately; it does not need text recognition. This is useful for a short marking note or an answer key you already have as text.

For paper materials, use Take photos with a mobile device in the upload window. Scan its private QR code with your phone and upload the pages from there. Start from the rubric page so the photos become grading context for this assessment. See Uploading student work for the phone capture instructions.

If the upload window shows Service temporarily unavailable, try again after maintenance has finished.

Check the recognized text

Once a document has finished processing, use View extracted text to expand its text. Read through it and correct any recognition mistakes, especially numbers, formulas, point values, and words that change the meaning of a marking rule. Your changes save automatically. Wait for Recognized text saved. before moving on.

Where a page preview is available, View context document opens the document's pages so you can compare them with the recognized text. Close the preview when you are done. Pasted text has no page-image preview.

If something goes wrong:

• Upload failed: choose Retry upload while the document's failed-upload row is still on the page. If you have already left or refreshed the page, select the original file again through Upload files.
• Text reading failed: choose Retry text recognition when offered. This starts another attempt to read the uploaded document.
• Wrong or unnecessary document: choose Delete file and confirm. Wait for text recognition to finish before deleting a document that is still being processed.

Deleting a context document does not remove criteria already extracted from it. Review those criteria separately if they are no longer appropriate.

Generate a draft rubric

1. Wait until the documents you want to use have finished processing. Extraction needs at least one completed context document containing text, but waiting for all intended documents helps avoid an incomplete draft.
2. Check and correct their recognized text.
3. Select Extract rubric criteria.
4. If criteria already exist, read the replacement warning before continuing. Extraction replaces the existing set of criteria; it is not an “add missing criteria” action. Any manual wording or structure you want to keep should be recorded before you proceed.
5. Wait while the draft is prepared. The page reloads when extraction finishes.
6. Review every item under Review rubric items, including its points and grading guidance.

Adding a document alone does not update your rubric. Extract again when you want a new draft from the updated materials, or edit the existing criteria yourself. If extraction fails, review the message and the available context text, then try Extract rubric criteria again.

Edit or build criteria yourself

Select a criterion's summary or its Edit criterion arrow to expand it. Use Add criterion to create a new one. You can build a rubric manually without uploading context documents.

Each criterion contains:

Check that important guidance from your uploaded materials appears in the relevant descriptions or Grading context fields. These are the instructions used to grade the work.

Break a task into subcriteria

Use Add subcriterion beneath a main criterion to split a task into smaller parts. For example, “Q2: Solve the equation” might have separate subcriteria for the method and the final answer. Fill in the main criterion first and let it save before adding its subcriteria.

Once a criterion has subcriteria, its Max points is calculated from the regular subcriteria and cannot be edited directly. The subcriteria carry the individual point limits. A parent criterion cannot be marked as bonus; mark individual bonus subcriteria instead. Bonus subcriteria do not increase the parent's regular maximum.

For example, regular subcriteria worth 2 and 3 points give their parent a 5-point maximum. A further 1-point bonus subcriterion remains extra credit.

Reorder or remove items

Drag a criterion by its dotted handle to change its order. You can also focus the handle and hold Alt while pressing the up or down arrow key. Reordering changes the display order and does not require existing work to be graded again.

To remove an item, open its Criterion actions menu (⋯), select Delete criterion, and confirm. Deleting a parent criterion also deletes its subcriteria.

Make sure your changes are saved

There is no separate Save button. The page saves shortly after you stop editing. Watch the status beneath the assessment title for Saving..., Saved., or Recognized text saved.

If the page reports bad values, correct the highlighted fields. A blank description, missing points, or invalid point value can prevent the rubric from saving. If you added an empty criterion by mistake, complete it or delete it.

If autosave fails, stay on the page and check your connection. Your edits remain in the page, but have not been saved. A further edit retries saving; Back to dashboard also tries to save before leaving. If asked whether to leave without saving, choose to stay if you need to keep your changes. Avoid refreshing while unsaved changes remain. If the editor reports that it is out of date, copy any unsaved wording somewhere safe before refreshing.

Use Back to dashboard when finished. Student-work upload becomes available once the assessment has at least one saved criterion. That is a minimum requirement, so check the entire rubric and its point totals before uploading the class's work.

Changing a rubric after grading

You can return to the rubric later, but changes to descriptions, grading guidance, points, bonus settings, or the set of criteria can affect existing results. grAider removes grades for affected criteria and asks you to Retry grading. Unaffected criterion grades and review decisions are retained. A changed parent can affect its subcriteria too, including when a subcriterion's points change the parent's total.

Previously approved work needs attention again after a substantive rubric change. Retry grading where prompted, review the resulting grades, and approve the work again. Simply changing display order does not have this effect.

Editing, adding, or deleting context documents alone does not revise existing criteria or grades. To apply new guidance, edit the relevant rubric criteria or extract a new draft and review it. Re-extraction may preserve criteria that are exactly unchanged, but you should still check the replacement rubric carefully.

When your rubric is ready, continue with Uploading student work.