Guide · Higher education
Grading handwritten university STEM exams with Graidable
Graidable is an AI-assisted grader for handwritten and scanned exams. It reads every page, drafts points step by step from your answer key, follows its rule on errors carried forward, and you approve every student.
The Graidable team
Published
Graidable is the tool we make. Every statement on this page was checked against the app on 5 November 2026.
In this article
Graidable is an AI-assisted grader for handwritten and scanned work in any subject. For a university STEM exam, a midterm or a problem set, it reads each student’s pages, drafts points question by question from your own answer key, and shows where on the page every point comes from. You review, change and approve every student. Nothing is final until you have.
Several tools take handwritten STEM work, among them Gradescope and GradingPal. Our comparison of eight of them sets out what each vendor says. This page covers Graidable in detail.
What Graidable does on each point
| What you’d ask | What Graidable does |
|---|---|
| Handwriting and scans | Reads handwritten, scanned and typed pages, math included. Upload PDFs, photos (JPEG, PNG or WebP) or a zip of them. |
| Equations and diagrams | Keeps every page as an image. The AI looks at drawings, diagrams, graphs and handwriting on the image itself, and where the machine reading and the image differ, it goes by the image. |
| A whole class in one scan | Sorts the pages to your students by the name or number written on them and the file name. You confirm the sorting. |
| Steps and partial credit | Follows the points, method points and deductions in your answer key. Where the key is silent, the shown work earns what it is worth, and the AI recomputes the student’s steps with a calculator. |
| Errors carried forward | Follows the rule your key states. Where it states none, an error costs points once, and later work is judged against the student’s own value. |
| A different valid method | Earns credit. Before calling an answer wrong, the AI checks it against the page of your key. |
| Uncertain items | Marked “Check closely”, with the reason. An answer it can’t read is marked unreadable, never guessed. |
| Who sets the grade | You. Every point, grade and comment is a proposal next to the student’s original page. You approve each student yourself, and there is no approve-all button. |
| What you get | A feedback PDF for each approved student, and a spreadsheet with each student’s points per question. |
| Free option | Your first class is free without a card: up to 30 students (300 pages) within 30 days, once your email is confirmed. |
| Price | Student $9.99 a month (10 students graded) and Professional $24.99 a month (60). Setting up, reading the work and reviewing are always free. |
| Student data | GDPR-compliant, with a data processing agreement, DPIA material and a list of every sub-processor. Neither we nor the AI providers train on student work. |
| Subjects and languages | Any subject and any language: math, physics, chemistry, engineering and the rest. |
From the scanned stack to approved grades
Upload the exam and your answer key. Add the task, the key or rubric, and any class material. Graidable tells the files apart from the student work.
Approve the questions and criteria. The AI finds the questions and their parts, keeps your own points, and drafts the criteria from your documents. You change what you like and approve them before any student is graded.
Upload the students’ pages. One scan of the whole class works. The pages are sorted to your students, and you can move a page or start a new student anywhere.
Start the grading. You see the cost before you start. Each student’s paper is graded in one pass against the approved criteria, and the students are graded in parallel.
Review each student. Points and feedback sit next to the student’s own pages, and each one shows the lines it rests on. Change anything, regrade a student from scratch, then approve.
Hand out the feedback. Download the feedback PDFs, one by one or all at once, and export the points to a spreadsheet. Students see nothing in the app.
How it reads handwriting and diagrams
Every uploaded page becomes an image. Scans and handwriting are read by text recognition, and each line keeps its place on the page, so a drafted point can show the exact lines it rests on. Typed pages are read from their own text, and typed pages with math or pictures are kept as images too.
Machine reading can be wrong, and it can quietly correct a student’s slip. So the AI is told that the image is the evidence. It opens the page image for drawings, diagrams, graphs and handwriting, and for a line whose reading looks garbled. When a reading stays uncertain, the item gets a “Check closely” flag that says why.
How the steps earn partial credit
Partial credit means points for correct steps when the final answer is wrong. Graidable gives them by your key. If your key gives a method point and an answer point per part, that is what the draft follows, deductions included.
Where the key says nothing about a step, the AI awards what the shown work earns and recomputes the student’s own numbers with a calculator tool. A correct solution by a method your key doesn’t show earns credit. Before the AI says an answer is wrong, it opens the page of your key the point rests on.
When the AI submits a grading, code checks the facts it states: that every cited line exists and that the points stay within each criterion. Anything that doesn’t hold goes back to be fixed.
How errors carried forward are graded
An error carried forward (also called follow-through or a consequential error) is a wrong value from an early step that the student then uses correctly later. The usual rule is that the error costs points once. Graidable follows whatever rule your key states. Where it states none, it counts the error once where it was made and judges the later work against the student’s own value (Figure 1).
A ball is thrown straight up at . Take . Find (a) the time to the top [2] and (b) the maximum height [2].
The key gives one point for the method and one for the answer in each part. The correct answers are and . With the error carried forward the page earns 3 of 4; charged again in (b), it would earn 2. How the exam boards write this rule, and where it stops, is in What is error carried forward.
Who decides the grade
You do. The AI’s points, grade and feedback arrive as proposals, each next to the place on the student’s page it comes from. You can change any point or comment, regrade a student from scratch, and approve each student yourself. Students don’t use the app: they get the feedback PDF you hand out, which holds the points, each question’s result and the feedback you kept, never your private notes.
What it costs
Your first class is free without a card: up to 30 students, or 300 pages, within 30 days, once your email is confirmed. After that:
- Student: $9.99 a month for 10 students graded.
- Professional: $24.99 a month for 60 students graded.
- The first plan starts with 20 free gradings. If you turn it on, each extra student costs $0.49 on Student or $0.35 on Professional.
- Several teachers or a whole department: write to us for a price. We can start with a free pilot.1
Setting up an assignment, reading the work and reviewing the results are always free.
What happens to student work
Graidable is GDPR-compliant. It has a data processing agreement, DPIA material and a list of every sub-processor, with the EU standard contractual clauses where needed. Files are stored with AWS in Ireland and the database with Railway in Amsterdam, encrypted in transit and at rest.
Every AI call requires zero data retention and no data collection, and a call that doesn’t meet that is stopped before it is sent. Neither we nor the AI providers train on student work.2
To see it on real pages first, try the live demo or grade your first class free.
Sources
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Graidable, security, privacy policy and data processing agreement. Checked 5 November 2026. ↑