Quickstart

One assignment, end to end. If you are launching from Canvas instead, start with Canvas (LTI). The grading steps below are the same once you are inside.

1. Create your account

Sign up at ravengrader.com/login with an email address and password, or with Continue with Google. Accounts are for instructors, teaching assistants, and graders. Students never create accounts.

2. Create a course

From your dashboard, create a course. A course holds your assignments, your roster, and any teaching assistants or graders you invite. To add colleagues, send an invite from the course. They receive a link and land in the course after signing in.

3. Add an assignment

Inside the course, choose Add assignment. An assignment is one exam, quiz, or problem set. Everything from here (rubric, submissions, grades, analytics) belongs to it.

4. Upload your answer key

Drop in your answer key as images, a PDF, or text. RavenGrader reads it and generates a rubric: the questions it found, the points on each, and what earns credit.

Read the rubric before grading anything. It is the specification every submission is measured against, so a mistake here multiplies across the whole class. Editing it takes seconds; correcting a class-wide mis-grade afterwards does not.

Include your own worked solutions and marking notes in the key if you have them. The rubric is generated from what you provide: a key with the reasoning shown produces better partial credit than one with only final answers.

No answer key yet? The Exam Builder can draft questions for you, which you then edit, regenerate individually, add to, or delete before finalising into a rubric. It has an undo if you overshoot.

5. Collect student work

Three ways, and you can mix them on one assignment:

  • Upload it yourself: drag scans or PDFs into the assignment.
  • Share a join code: a 6-digit code students use to upload their own work without an account.
  • Canvas: submissions arrive through the LMS.

Details and the trade-offs are in Collecting work.

6. Grade

Start grading from the assignment. Progress is shown per submission as it runs, and you can cancel a run in flight. Anything not yet processed is credited back automatically.

How long it takes

Grading is live — results stream in as each submission finishes. One submission is typically under a minute; a full class takes a few minutes. Grading runs on our servers, so you can close the tab and we’ll email you when the run is done. See FAQ.

7. Review and approve

  1. Open a submission to see the transcription beside the per-question scoring.
  2. Check anything flagged first. Those are the items the model was least confident about, and they are where errors concentrate.
  3. Adjust points or edit feedback wherever you disagree.
  4. Approve.

Grading by question instead of by student is often faster for large classes. See Grading.

8. Return grades

  • Feedback reports: each student gets a private link showing their per-question rubric checks and written feedback, printable to PDF.
  • Canvas: grades post back to the gradebook on LTI assignments.
  • CSV export: a Canvas-compatible file for manual upload.

9. Look at the analytics

Once an assignment is graded, Analytics shows question averages, score distributions, and the mistakes that recurred. It is the fastest way to find the problem half the class got wrong, which is usually worth more than any individual score.