Teacher Grading Tools: Rubrics, Curves, & More
Grading is where teaching either compounds or collapses. The right rubric makes feedback consistent across thirty students; the wrong one buries you in second-guessing every score. With v1.8.0, the whole grading workflow gets handed back to you: build the rubric the way you grade, dial the AI toward your style, curve a tough assignment in one click, and override any score with a note attached. All without leaving the assignment page, all without anyone telling you how to do your job.
Why This Update Even Exists
Every teacher who's used AI grading has hit the same wall. It grades fast. It grades consistently. But it grades against someone else's rubric. Maybe it weighs vocabulary too heavily for the unit on cultural context you're actually teaching. Maybe a fixed five-point scale doesn't match the band system your department uses. Maybe it grades just a touch harsher than your class deserves, and you end up spending the evening manually bumping scores up. Or — worst case — you stop trusting it.
v1.8.0 is the answer to all of that. You're in the driver's seat now. Every part of grading bends to how you actually want to do it.
Build the Rubric You'd Actually Use
Every writing and oral assignment now opens with a rubric builder. Add categories, rename them, set point values, write the actual language you want the AI to evaluate against — all in a clean grid you can edit cell by cell. Two layouts depending on how detailed your rubric needs to be:
Holistic
One descriptor per band. A single sentence captures what a 'Proficient' or 'Developing' response looks like across the whole rubric.
Complex
A grid of descriptors. Each category has its own band cells, so a student can be Proficient in Grammar and Developing in Content on the same paper.
Save once, reuse forever
Your rubrics live on your teacher account, not on the assignment. Build the perfect one for your AP Spanish writing prompts and just pick it from the dropdown next semester. We ship a small library of universal presets out of the box so you don't have to start from a blank page.
And when you tweak something, you can either save it back to your library or apply the change as a one-off for just this assignment. You're never stuck between "change it everywhere" and "change it nowhere."
Grade Your Way: Lenient, Default, or Strict
Every grader has a style. Some lean generous when a student is on the edge between two bands; some lean strict. We get it. v1.8.0 lets you tell the AI which way to lean before it grades anything. One quick toggle per assignment:
Lenient
On borderline calls, round up rather than down. Capped at one band higher than where the work would normally land.
Default
Standard rubric application. No thumb on the scale either way.
Strict
On borderline calls, round down rather than up. Capped at one band below — a nudge, not a punishment.
A nudge, not a flip
Lenient and Strict are gentle by design. Setting Strict won't take an A student down to a D — a 78 might land as a 75, a 92 might land as a 90. The point is to match your grading philosophy, not to distort the rubric.
Curve a Tough Assignment in One Click
Sometimes an assignment runs harder than you thought it would. Sometimes a question turns out to be a trap. It happens to all of us. The teacher results page now has an Apply Curve button on the Class Stats card — pick a curve type, set it up once, every score recalculates instantly. Three styles to choose from:
Linear Additive
Add a fixed number of points to every student. The simplest curve — perfect when the rubric ran a few points low across the board.
Square Root
Compress the bottom and stretch the top. A 49 becomes a 70, an 81 becomes a 90, a 100 stays a 100. For when an assignment was uniformly harder than expected.
Boundary
Define score ranges and what each maps to. '50-69 becomes a 70, 70-89 becomes an 85, 90+ stays.' A staircase curve with explicit floors and ceilings.
Curves get saved to your account too, so a curve you used on one assignment is two clicks away on the next. The gradebook always shows the raw score next to the curved one with an arrow between them, so you never lose track of what's what.
Decide Who Sees the Curve
Sometimes you want to curve quietly — internally, for your gradebook — without students seeing the bump. Sometimes the curve is the score you want them to see. There's a single green switch labeled Show for students next to every curve. Flip it on and students see the curved score; flip it off and they see only the raw one. Set it once and the preference carries forward.
Default is ON
For most teachers, the whole point of a curve is to give students the better number. The switch defaults to on for that reason. If you'd rather curve in private and decide later, it's one click away.
Override Any Score, Leave a Note
The AI grades fast, but the final word is always yours. On any teacher results page — writing, oral, reading, listening, quizzes — every per-question score has a small pencil that appears when you hover. Click it, type a new point value (partial credit fine), and optionally add a grader note. That note shows up as a purple "Grader's Notes" card under the question on the student's results page, right where they'll actually see it.
One place for the score and the why
No more separate document of grading comments. The score and the explanation live together, and the student sees both. Editable anytime.
The total score has its own pencil too, for those holistic moments where the adjustment doesn't map cleanly to one question. Per-question overrides automatically recompute the total, so most of the time you won't even need to touch it.
Release Results When You're Ready
Every assignment now has a Result Visibility setting. Three options: students see scores as soon as they submit, after the due date passes, or at a custom date and time you pick. Until then, students see a friendly "Results will be released on…" message — no score, no feedback, no points. Everything is graded quietly in the background, so the moment your release time hits, the results just appear.
A gentle nudge when results drop
The first time a student opens an assignment with newly-released results, a small alert badge appears on their Results tab. No more "did you check your grade?" emails — they'll see it the next time they're in Lingua. The badge clears the moment they view the page.
Multiple Sections? It All Travels
If you teach multiple sections of the same course, your rubric, grading approach, and visibility settings travel with the assignment automatically when you share it across classes. Tweak the rubric on one copy later, and we'll ask whether you want to apply that change to every section or just this one — your call, single click. Curves stay per-assignment by design (a curve on one section shouldn't surprise the others), but since the curve itself lives on your account, applying it elsewhere is also a couple of clicks away.
What's Coming Next
The grading tools in v1.8.0 are the foundation for a few things we're working on: class-level rubric stats that surface which categories tend to drag scores down across your cohort, exported gradebooks with curve information ready for Canvas or Schoology, and rubric prompt customization for teachers who want even more direct control over what the AI looks for. Rubrics and curves are now real, first-class objects in Lingua — the rest of the gradebook is going to build on them.