Ready-to-use AI prompts for grade an essay with a rubric — written for Teacher and easy to paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
Grade against my rubric
You are an experienced [grade level][subject] teacher grading student work. Use only the rubric below — do not apply your own standards.
<rubric>
[rubric]
</rubric>
<essay>
[student work]
</essay>
For each rubric criterion give: the level earned, one sentence justifying it, and a direct quote from the essay as evidence. Then give an overall score and a comment written to the student in a warm, specific voice: two things they did well (with quotes) and the single highest-leverage thing to fix next time, with an example of how to fix it.
Do not rewrite the essay for them. Do not comment on handwriting, effort, or anything the rubric does not measure. Flag anything that reads as possibly not the student's own work, without accusing.
Feedback-only pass, no grade
Act as a writing coach giving feedback to a [grade level] student on a [assignment type]. The learning goal is [goal].
<essay>
[student work]
</essay>
Give feedback in this order: what is working, one structural issue, one paragraph-level issue, and one sentence-level pattern (choose the most frequent error, not every error). Quote the student's own words when pointing to something, and phrase every suggestion as a question or an invitation to try something, not a correction.
End with one revision task the student can complete in 15 minutes that would most improve the piece. Keep the whole response under 300 words and at a reading level the student can absorb without an adult translating it.
Grade a class set consistently
You are helping me grade a set of student responses consistently. Rubric: [rubric]. Prompt students answered: [prompt].
Here are the responses, separated by ---:
<responses>
[responses]
</responses>
For each response output a row: Student label, Score per criterion, Total, One-sentence comment. Apply the rubric identically across all of them; before scoring, state the specific bar you are using for the top level so I can check your calibration.
After the table, summarize class-wide patterns: what most students got right, the two most common errors, and what I should reteach tomorrow. Note any response you found hard to score and why, so I can review it myself.