Writing Solutions

Grading writing assignments can be challenging and time-consuming. Yet, writing plays a key role in helping students develop the critical-thinking and analytical skills they need for success.

That’s why we built Writing Solutions — to help assess your students’ writing and critical thinking, while relieving you of the time required to thoroughly evaluate student assignments.

Writing Solutions lets you easily create assignments, upload materials, and see student progress. You can also choose from a library of writing prompts and grading rubrics.

Writing Solutions has three scoring methods: manual, auto-scoring, and AI-assisted. Each method is fully integrated with SafeAssign similarity check so you can ensure your students are submitting original work.

Manual grading

With manual scoring, you can grade all student submissions without any system input. Still, Writing Solutions has many built-in features to make your grading faster and easier.

With manual assignments, you can:

• Choose or edit pre-created rubrics or create your own
• Quickly assign point values for each rubric category so that a composite score can be automatically generated
• Provide in-line comments from a library of common error feedback notes or create your own

Automated grading

You can choose between two types of automated grading. Both options help you save time, grade promptly, and assign more writing projects.

All writing prompts from the Writing Solutions library can be automatically graded. You won’t need to grade student submissions but can review and change system-generated scores.

Auto-scoring

The first automated option is programmed to grade according to a Pearson standard. To enable this, we take the following steps:

1. Subject matter experts create writing prompts and questions.
2. Instructors nationwide assign those questions to their students.
3. After 600 to 800 essays are completed per question, each essay is hand-graded by subject matter experts.
4. Each hand-graded essay and its grading rubric are fed into Writing Solutions, enabling the system to develop intelligence around what makes a well-written or a poorly written essay.

Writing Solutions goes beyond recognizing key words and phrases to understanding language and the nuances of meaning.

AI-assisted grading

A more nuanced version of the auto-scoring option is AI-assisted grading. With this scoring method, you can adapt the scoring algorithm to your unique grading style as follows:

1. First, you manually score 20 student essays. Based on your scores, the system designates a “training set” of 20 low-, medium-, and high-scoring essays.
2. Using this training set, the AI assistant adapts to your grading style by adjusting scoring differences based on the Pearson standard. For example, an instructor may grade more leniently compared to the Pearson standard, prompting the AI assistant to adjust the grading scale upward.
3. From there, the AI assistant populates grades for the remaining essays using your recognized grading style.
4. You can then review and adjust the assigned scores until the AI assistant has adequately learned your grading style. Twenty essays are usually enough; however, it’s up to you to decide when the AI assistant is ready to automatically grade the remaining essays.

Now you have effective ways to assess students’ writing and critical thinking — without the hassle of hand-grading every assignment.

How Writing Solutions helps students

With Writing Solutions, students gain the practice they need to hone their writing and critical-thinking skills. Customized grading rubrics and personalized feedback help them focus and produce better work. Organizational tools help them keep up with assignments.

Your students can:

• Receive grades and feedback
• Write and upload assignments
• Use Pearson Writer, a robust tool assisting learners with any writing assignment

With Writing Solutions, you and your students have everything you need to foster better writing — all in one place.