The AI Essay Grader
that reads handwriting

In short:

• Handwritten essays: yes — scanned or photographed, cursive or print.

• Typed and digital essays: yes — PDF, DOCX, images.

• Your own rubric: yes — your criteria, your point allocation.

• Criterion-by-criterion partial credit: yes, with the justification quoted from the essay.

• Teacher review before students see anything: always. Examino proposes a grade; you decide.

• Batch grading: yes — upload a whole class at once, about 30 seconds per essay.

• Languages: English, French, Spanish and German.

• Levels: primary school through higher education.

• Free plan: 10 essays per month, no credit card.

We combine handwriting OCR with a rubric-aware grading model. The AI transcribes the essay — including crossed-out sentences, inserted paragraphs and margin notes — then reads it against your criteria, not against a generic scale. For each criterion it proposes a score and quotes the passage that justifies it, the way you would underline it with a red pen.

Yes, and you should. Upload or type your criteria — thesis, argument, use of evidence, organisation, style, mechanics, whatever your department uses — with the points attached to each. Examino grades against that rubric and returns a criterion-level breakdown, so the scores line up with what you already tell students. If you don't have a rubric to hand, Examino proposes one from the prompt and you edit it.

Argumentative, persuasive, narrative and expository essays, literary analysis and commentary, document-based questions, free-response and extended-response answers, book reports, reading responses, case studies, lab reports, take-home exams, term papers and dissertations. Because Examino is not built around one subject, the same account also grades short answers, maths working and diagrams — useful when you teach more than one course.

You stay the teacher. Every score is a proposal, shown with the criterion it maps to and the passage it came from, and nothing is released to a student until you approve it. Teachers typically adjust a handful of grades in a class set and keep the rest — one told us they readjusted 1 grade out of 34. Grading against your own rubric is what makes that possible: the AI is applying your standard, not inventing one.

Yes — every teacher gets 10 free graded papers per month, no credit card required. That's enough to run a real assignment through it before deciding.

Two differences matter most.

First, Examino starts from paper. Most writing-feedback tools assume a digital document you paste or upload. If your students still hand in handwritten essays and exam booklets, that's the whole workflow — so scanning, transcription and grading are one step here, not three.

Second, Examino is not a single-subject tool. Essays today, a history DBQ tomorrow, a maths test next week, a biology lab report after that — same dashboard, same rubric logic, same exports. Teachers tell us the multi-subject coverage is what makes it stick, because it replaces the whole grading stack rather than one corner of it.

Yes. Examino grades essays in English, French, Spanish and German, and the interface is available in all four. Language teachers use it both ways: to grade essays written in the target language, and to grade literature essays written in the students' first language.

Student work is encrypted in transit and at rest, and hosted in the EU. Examino automatically redacts student names before analysis, is GDPR-compliant with a ready-to-sign DPA for institutions, and does not use student submissions to train AI models. That is the main difference from pasting essays into a general-purpose chatbot.

Yes. Students scan their essay with their phone via a QR code that opens their native camera — no app store, no account creation, no login. It is one of the most-loved features among teachers using Examino with school classes.

You can export annotated PDFs and grade CSVs that import into both. Direct API integration with Google Classroom is on our 2026 roadmap (institution plan).