EssayTagger is a web-based tool that helps you grade your essays faster by eliminating the repetitive and inefficient aspects of grading papers. You'll be able to speed up your grading process without sacrificing the quality of the feedback you give to your students.

EssayTagger is not an auto-grader. You still do all the grading yourself, but now you can do it faster!

EssayTagger works entirely in your web browser so there's nothing to download or install on your computer. This means it doesn't matter whether you use a Mac or a PC, whether you're at school or at home. You can grade essays from anywhere in the world where there's an internet connection.

Assignments are completely customizable. You define the elements you're looking for in each assignment:

These core elements are the backbone of your rubric.

You also have full control over the rubric's quality levels:

Where is the student's "Thesis" or "Evidence" elements? Our drag-and-drop interface makes it extremely fast and easy for you to identify and "tag" each core element as they appear in each paper. As soon as you tag a core element the associated evaluation options pop up. You've identified the student's "Thesis", now decide how good it is and what kind of feedback the student needs.

You customize the comments — add, edit, delete them — however you like. These are your comments, your feedback. We're not going to leave you stuck with canned, pre-written comments that don't suit your needs or style.

All of your tags and feedback comments are automatically saved online "to the cloud" as soon as you select them. No "Save" button to press, no files to remember to email to yourself. The marked-up essays are available on the Web for you to review and digitally return to your students.

Think about how much repetition there is when you grade, how many of the same comments you find yourself writing on paper after paper. That's the kind of inefficiency we're trying to eliminate.

Our intuitive drag-and-drop "tagging" interface allows you to quickly identify the essay's core elements, evaluate the quality, and provide targeted feedback comments. Adding a new comment to the list will take only as much time as it takes for you to think and type it:

And the real time savings come in when you encounter the same issue in another student's paper; the comment you just added can be applied with a quick mouse click, saving you precious seconds, energy, and brainpower.

As you grade each essay you'll add more and more comments for each core element in the rubric. Pretty soon you'll end up with a very robust collection of comments that cover the gamut of student skill levels. And it will all be perfectly organized and easy to retrieve.

And, of course, that rubric and all of its comments are saved and ready to be reused on the next assignment.

It's everything you normally do, only more efficient.

The whole process of tagging and commenting on papers is stored in our database. And now think about what we've stored: we know that you selected a comment from the "Needs Work" column for Jimmy's "Thesis" element. And we know the exact piece of text that makes up his thesis.

This might not seem like much, but with the organizational and cross-referential power of a database at our fingertips we can do some pretty freakin' amazing things with that data.

• Learn from your results: Isn't it awful to spend all that time grading essays and then the kids barely look at them and nothing more comes of it? With EssayTagger.com your graded essays can now inform and direct the focus of your follow-up lessons and activities.


• Aggregate rubric performance: EssayTagger.com can tell you exactly where your students are excelling or struggling in your rubric. All of the evaluations you make as you grade are stored in our database. That means that we can crunch the numbers and give you a high-level view of how your students performed. Now you know what to focus on in class tomorrow.



• Rubric drill-down analytics: Go deeper than just the aggregate data. Retrieve text excerpts and sort the students by their performance on each individual rubric core element. Here we drill down into the "Topic sentence" core element and retrieve the students from the weakest quality level, their associated text excerpts, or both:

And that's just after one assignment. Things get even crazier and cooler as you grade subsequent assignments (progression analysis coming soon).

• Track individual progress over time: If you use the same rubric or if your rubrics have some common core elements (e.g. they all have a "Thesis"), you'll able to see how a given student progresses over time. You'll be able to see that Joey's use of evidence has gradually improved while Rachel's progress on transitions has stalled.


• Overall trends: Are we seeing class-wide improvement on theses? What's Amanda's thesis progress relative to the rest of the class?


• A more complete picture: With all of this data available, imagine referring Paul to a resource room or writing center where they can pull up his performance profile and instantly focus in on where he's struggling in his recent assignments.

All of this specific data tracking was possible before, but it simply was not practical for a busy teacher to keep track of on her own. Getting it all into an easily accessible database changes everything.

We believe that this data is an insanely powerful tool and is a game-changer that will transform your classroom.

We've gone through great efforts to make EssayTagger an impressive, intuitive, and gorgeous tool. We hope that we look and perform like a million dollars, but we are not a mega-corporation.

The reality is that we are a tiny startup that was created by a high school English teacher.