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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Answers to the most commonly asked inquiries.

Does SAGrader grade spelling and grammar?

Answer: SAGrader focuses on assessing the content of students' writing, but you can also add metrics to your assignments that evaluate general writing skills. These metrics evaluate things like spelling, grammar, reading ease and word count. It's worth noting these metrics are currently experimental, which means we're still ironing out some rough edges.

How much do you charge? Who pays?

Answer: Generally, if you teach a college course, students will pay for SAGrader as a course supplement. There's no charge for instructors. We can work with your bookstore to sell enrollment codes through them, or students can pay us directly online. We can also work out payment from your school or department, but we still charge per student.

High school classes are a bit more complicated since you generally cannot charge students directly. We charge per student, but we can arrange payment from you or your school in whatever manner works for you.

How is SAGrader different from other automatic essay grading programs?

Answer: Most other essay grading programs base their scoring and feedback on statistical models of human-graded papers. This allows them to provide fairly generic advice across broad dimensions, like style or focus.

In contrast, SAGrader uses linguistic strategies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) to assess the specific ideas discussed in a submission. This enables us to deliver incredibly specific, topic-based suggestions for improvement. As a result, SAGrader is the only program ideally suited for content area classes concerned with teaching students substantive content through writing assignments.

For a more detailed comparison between SAGrader™, MYAccess!™, WriteToLearn™, and Criterion™, download the SAGrader comparison document.

Are there assignments SAGrader cannot grade?

SAGrader is not useful for grading broadly defined essays with no specific content focus. SAGrader is designed to assess a student's knowledge about a substantive topic as expressed in a specific writing assignment. In other words, we don't recommend using SAGrader in a creative writing class or to assess general writing skills in an English class.