No bubble sheets, no answer sheets: grade the paper you already hand out

Most automated grading starts with a form you have to print: a bubble sheet, a QR-coded header, a template that lines up with a scanner. The form is the catch. It means a fixed question format, a trip to the copier, and a student who shades the wrong circle getting a zero on an answer they actually knew. SuperGrader starts from the other end — the paper you already hand out — and the whole setup is a photo.

For a quiz: photograph your answer key

You take a picture of your own answer key, the one you would mark from anyway. SuperGrader reads it into a blueprint: every question, the correct answer, and its point value, shown for you to correct before a single paper is graded. Then you photograph the students’ papers and each is scored against that blueprint. Short answers, numbers, equations, a worked-out math problem — not just multiple choice, because there is no bubble grid deciding what a question is allowed to be.

For an essay: the rubric is the answer key

Open-ended work has no answer key to photograph, so the rubric plays that part. Build one in seconds from a short description, or photograph a rubric you already use, then grade the class against it — each criterion marked met, partially met or not met, with a line of evidence from the student’s own writing. Same motion as the quiz: the thing you already have becomes the standard.

Nothing proprietary in the loop

No special paper, no hardware, no app a student has to install. Handwriting is fine, phone photos are fine, a scanned PDF of the whole class is fine. Students write the way they always have, and the format of your assessment is yours to decide — not the form’s.

You still decide every grade

Reading the paper is the AI’s job; deciding the grade is yours. The blueprint is shown before grading, uncertain reads are flagged rather than guessed, and any score you change stays changed. What you remove is the busywork — the printing, the shading, the stack of forms — not the judgement.