An unlimited number of prompts are available using the Glencoe Online Essay Grader. Glencoe currently provides 33 additional writing prompts.

Yes! You can use the SkillWriter Essay Builder Wizard to easily create narrative, expository, descriptive, or persuasive essay assignments that will be automatically scored on a either a four-, five-, or six-point scale.

Using the SkillWriter Essay Wizard, you can create your own prompts in an instant. First, choose the type of essay you'd like to assign and the appropriate rubric point scale against which it will be scored. Next, enter the prompt and the number of sections that they essay should contain. Finally, name each section of the essay (i.e. introduction, body, and conclusion) and optionally provide instructional hints for your students to view as they draft each section of the essay.

The following writing modes are included in the Glencoe Online Essay Grader prompts: autobiographical narrative, personal narrative, biographical sketch, persuasive writing, editorial, descriptive writing, research report, letter, responding to literature, literary analysis, literary criticism, and critical review.

Teachers can assign essays in either instructional mode or in testing mode. In the instructional mode, the Glencoe Online Essay Grader Tutor and section hints help improve student writing. In testing mode, students do not have access to the various writing tools. Regardless of the assignment mode, teachers can run various benchmarking reports that track student and class progress over time and allow teachers to effectively target assignments and instruction. Finally, essays can be scored on either a four, five, or six point scoring scale to match your state assessment.

In addition to providing holistic and six trait numerical and narrative feedback, the Glencoe Online Essay Grader provides valuable tools to improve student writing. To assist students with the writing process, we offer essay-specific section hints, a spell-checker, a thesaurus, and graphic organizers. The Tutor function provides individualized feedback by section and by sentence and suggestions for improving grammar and mechanics. Students can also view student model essays for each writing mode, and click on a fully annotated interactive model essay for further writing instruction. Teachers can also provide additional instruction to students in the Teacher Comments section.

No, students do not need to compose their essay in the online application. Students may compose their essays in a word-processing, e-mail, or text-editing program and then copy and paste them into the Glencoe Online Essay Grader interface. However, students may wish to draft their essays in the application to take advantage of the powerful writing tools embedded within the program.

Students can save their essays prior to submitting them. This way, students can take several sessions to effectively complete the writing process.

Yes, students are able to revise, edit and re-score previously submitted essays, but only if the essay has been reassigned to the student by the teacher.

The actual scoring of an essay takes no more than a few milliseconds.

Students receive several types of feedback on their essays, including a holistic score, six trait scores, and narrative feedback in each of the six writing traits.

Glencoe has developed a rubric for each essay mode. These rubrics were developed based on the rubrics employed in standardized state writing assessments.

SkillWriter^SM, an Internet-based application developed by Bookette Software, evaluates essays submitted to Glencoe Online Essay Grader. Founded in 1990, Bookette Software is an educational assessment software development company with headquarters in Monterey, California. Bookette specializes in developing scaleable software to build, administer, score and report on-going assessments for schools, districts, states, and worldwide education systems.

In order to train SkillWriter^SM to effectively, automatically score student essays, essay prompts are administered in real classrooms by real teachers like you. Then, expert human scorers use the rubrics generated by Glencoe to evaluate and provide both analytical and holistic numerical and narrative feedback for each essay. These essays along with the associated scores and feedback are then used to "train" a set of neural networks to react to student essays like an expert human scorer.

Glencoe has developed a rubric for each essay mode. These rubrics were developed based on the rubrics employed in many standardized state writing assessments. In addition, essays can be scored on four-, five-, or six-point scoring scales.

All essays can be scored on four-, five-, or six-point scales. The teacher can decide which scoring scale should be employed for any given assignment.

When the network encounters an essay written in a highly unusual style, the network tags the essay to be reviewed by an independent human reader.

No. However, the Glencoe Online Essay Grader can detect duplicated responses and will flag essays written in unusual styles.

Yes, the length of an essay may affect its score. For example, a very short essay may not demonstrate proficiency in certain writing traits and the assigned scores and feedback will reflect this.

The Glencoe Online Essay Grader mimics the grading behavior of teachers. The network looks for characteristics of an essay and evaluates each characteristic against the criteria established for each point on the scale. While the expert human scorers evaluate the essays used to calibrate the network may vary from therefore you have the ability to override the computer-generated score.

Teachers may override system scores if you do not agree with the scores generated by the program. While we employ expert human scorers to train SkillWriter^SM, you may employ different grading standards. A computer application does not replace what you do as a writing teacher; rather it provides valuable writing tools to your students and powerful reports to you, saving you time and helping you to differentiate instruction.

The Glencoe Online Essay Grader offers teachers a variety of reports at the group and individual student level. Teachers can also run reports on their entire student population. Individual reports include: Performance by Test, Performance by Standard, Gain, Test Ticket, Etc.

Yes, the Glencoe Online Essay Grader provides teachers with easy to define tag groups. Teachers can then create assignments and run disaggregated reports for these Tag Groups.

The following specifications are indicative of minimum and recommended performance attributes for networks. Bookette recognize that all facilities will not have immediate access to the recommended network configurations:

You can order the Glencoe Online Essay Grader online, by mail, or by phone. Contact Us.

The teacher will need to provide the following information: teacher name, teacher e-mail, number of classes taught, grade level of each class, and the number of students in each class. Once Bookette has received this information, the administrator and/or teacher's site code, login, and password, along with student logins and passwords will be provided to the teacher or administrator via email.