The staff room copier is broken, your Year 9 test papers are waiting in your bag and report meetings are on Thursday. Yet the phone in your pocket is enough to digitize handwritten papers, have them graded against your rubric and review the scores wherever you are. This guide explains how to take usable photos, how grading on a phone works from start to finish, and what is still better done on a computer.
Why grade from your phone
- No scanner needed: a recent phone camera gives an image more than sharp enough to read handwriting.
- Dead time becomes useful: a free period, a train ride or ten minutes before class are enough to review a few papers that have already been graded.
- Late papers no longer hold anything up: the student who was absent hands in their paper on Monday, you take a photo and it joins the existing batch.
- Handing back starts from the same place: annotated papers and the grade sheet can be shared from your phone, by email, Drive or any app you like.
How to photograph a handwritten paper
Photo quality drives everything else: an AI, like a human grader, can only grade well what it can read well. A few habits are enough.
- One photo per page, framing the whole page, margins included: an answer written in the margin must stay in the picture.
- The paper lying flat on a plain-coloured table, rather than held in your hand or resting on your lap.
- Good light, no shadow: near a window, with the phone well above the sheet so your hand or the phone doesn't cast a shadow. Avoid the flash, which creates glare on the paper.
- The phone parallel to the sheet: a photo taken at an angle distorts the lines. A photo taken sideways (rotated 90°), on the other hand, is not a problem: it is straightened automatically.
- In page order, one paper after another: this is the order in which the pages will be grouped.
How grading on a phone works
With the Correxio Android app, grading follows the same steps as on a computer, with the same account:
- The exam: photograph or import the exam statement, and your answer key if you have one.
- The papers: take a photo of each page directly in the app, then group the pages paper by paper.
- The rubric: the AI drafts a first version from the exam; you edit it criterion by criterion (see how to build a grading rubric).
- The grading: the student's name is hidden before the AI reads the paper, then each paper gets a score per question, with a justification and annotations placed on the photo.
- The review: you go through the papers, adjust a score or an annotation and approve.
- Handing back: the annotated papers as PDF and the grade sheet as CSV can be shared from your phone.
On a computer, the same batch is still there: you can photograph the papers on your phone and review them on a big screen, or the other way round. From the website, a QR code shown on screen also lets you send photos taken on your phone straight into the batch open on your computer, without installing the app.
What is better done on a big screen
A phone excels at taking photos and at quick reviews. Two tasks remain more comfortable on a larger screen:
- Writing a detailed rubric: a twenty-criterion rubric is faster to type on a keyboard.
- Comparing papers with one another to keep grading consistent across the whole batch: you see the paper and the score breakdown side by side.
For a whole stack straight out of the copier, a single PDF of the entire class is also faster than thirty photos: it is then split into papers, file by file or page by page.
What about student data?
Photographing a paper with your phone's camera puts it in your photo gallery, which is often synced to a backup service. Taking the photo from inside the app avoids that detour: the image goes straight into the batch. The student's name is hidden before grading and the data is hosted in France, as explained on the security and GDPR page.
In short
A phone is enough to digitize a stack of papers, as long as you take care with the photos: one page per photo, lying flat, well lit. Grading, review and handing back can then all be done from the same device, and the final grade is always the one you approve.