The Story of GRADED+

GRADED+ was born from the collective experience of a group of former NYC schoolteachers. As teachers, they were firm believers in the value of formative assessment in pinpointing the learning needs of their students, but they persistently struggled to keep up with the volume of student work, especially the handwritten variety. Reluctantly, like many NYC teachers, they had to resign themselves to the idea that they would never be able to find the time to grade every assignment and provide thoughtful feedback to every student. As passionate teachers, this really hurt, since they knew that every piece of student work that went ungraded was a missed opportunity to meet students where they were.

‍

Fast forward to 2024: with the advent of Computer Vision, and the rapid improvement of this technology, they saw an opportunity to increase the effective bandwidth of teachers. If technology could create a digital portfolio of student work and take a first stab at grading it and providing feedback, it would save teachers a mountain of work, and make it possible for them to realize the dream of providing every student thoughtful feedback at the right moment. Further, armed with a digital portfolio, teachers would be better able to trace longer term patterns in the student’s thinking and share work with parents so they could help their child at opportune moments.

This was the beginning of a journey that has now culminated in the latest release of GRADED+, which supports Math and ELA for K-12 schools and is integrated with both Google Classroom as well as the NYC ATS system. The latest version of GRADED+ is designed to be simple for teachers to pick up and get value from immediately.

‍

GRADED+ is not designed to replace teachers or provide direct instruction to students. While some of these instructional goals are worthwhile, the state of the art still has a long way to go before we can sufficiently trust it to teach our kids without a teacher supervising the interaction. Instead, GRADED+ was designed with a single purpose in mind - to give teachers superpowers. It amplifies the talents and abilities of hardworking teachers and makes it possible for them to 10X their available bandwidth so more students can benefit from their teaching. 

The team that built GRADED+ doesn’t think of itself as yet another software company. They think of themselves as a “solving problems” company. They don’t measure themselves by how much software they’ve shipped or how much money those products make. They measure themselves by how many teachers and students they’ve been able to help. They are genuinely invested in your success and will not rest until the job is done. They pride themselves on their ability to learn from teachers’ experience with their products and rapidly iterate until their users’ needs are met.

‍
As a small company, SOLVED is able to adapt and swing for the fences in ways that larger vendors with their bureaucratic processes, internal politics, and vested interests simply cannot. If you’ve previously worked with some of these vendors, you know exactly what we’re talking about. If you’d like to learn more about GRADED+, go to the SOLVED website. If you’ve heard enough and you’re ready to join the hundreds of teachers using GRADED+, become part of this movement today.

‍