Overview
The Grading Studio is Kira's grading hub for the 2026–2027 school year. It gives you a single place to see everything that needs your attention and to grade it — on your own or with AI assistance.
Kira offers a range of AI grading features, but teachers always have the final say. Nothing goes back to students until you release it.
Opening the Grading Studio
There are two ways to get there:
From the AI tools bar, select Grading Studio.
From the side navigation, click Evaluate, then Grading Studio.
Either path lands you on the Studio page.
Reading the Studio page
The Studio page breaks down your grading workload so you can prioritize:
Top priority — work that has been due the longest.
New submissions — recently submitted work.
A summary of what needs grading, what needs to be released, and what you've already released.
The To Release step is where your final review happens. Even after you (or the AI) grade a submission, it stays with you until you click Release and send it back to students.
Grading a lesson
Open a lesson from your grading queue to see its submissions. You'll be able to tell which submissions still need grading and which have already been partially graded by AI.
Click into a student's work. You can switch between students at any time using the student name at the top of the screen.
You'll see every question the student completed.
From here, you can grade manually — including written responses — or use AI:
Click Grade all with AI at the top to have the AI grade the entire submission for that student.
To grade in parallel, start Grade all with AI for several students, then come back to check each one's status.
Coming soon: A Grade all with AI button for the whole class, so you can grade an entire assignment at once and review afterward. This isn't available yet.
Reviewing and adjusting AI grades
After the AI grades a submission, you can modify any score.
Click Modify grade to see how the AI arrived at a score. For example, it might show a 75% based on the rubric — a level 2 for relevance (rather than a level 3) and a level 2 for grammar conventions.
If you disagree, you can:
Click a different rubric level to reassign points, or
Adjust the point total manually.
AI writing and plagiarism detection
Two detection tools are new this year and can be run on any written response. They're less essential for short free responses and most useful on longer, essay-type work.
AI writing detection explains why a response may or may not have been written by AI. Treat it as a way to support your own judgment rather than a definitive answer — AI writing detectors are not always reliable, so use the tool to back up your instincts when something doesn't sound like a particular student.
Plagiarism detection is more precise. It searches the web for passages that may have been copied or closely paraphrased and returns a report with match percentages and the exact source URLs. This gives you concrete evidence to reference when talking with a student.
Leaving feedback
Open the Feedback tab to review and add comments.
If you graded with AI, it will automatically leave brief notes, usually technical ones about how the student could have earned more points.
Delete any AI note you don't want to keep.
Add your own feedback — this is a good place to add a human touch alongside the technical detail.
When you submit, students see both the AI notes and your own.
How different question types are graded
Multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank are graded automatically and appear as AI-graded. When you grade with AI, an explanation is added describing why each answer was correct or incorrect. On science or math questions, this includes the underlying reasoning.
Whiteboard problems are graded on a rubric, like written responses. You can reselect rubric levels, review the AI's feedback (keeping or deleting it), and add your own.
Note: Rubrics are created when the lesson is created! If you’d like to grade students on a different rubric, you can change it under the ‘Question Settings’ for that question in your lesson or course.
Releasing grades
When you're satisfied with a student's scores, click Release Grades — either from the student's work or back on the assignment.
If you graded students in parallel, they'll show as graded and unreleased. You can release all grades for the assignment at once directly from that page. Once released, the work is complete, and you can move on.
Finding what to grade next
Use the Studio's filters to focus your work. You can view:
Items that need grading
Items that are graded and unreleased
Work by type, by class, or by whether it's the main lesson or personalized learning materials (new to Kira this year)
A note on grading full courses
When grading a course (rather than a single lesson), clicking a student's name doesn't take you straight to their work. Instead, it opens a page where you select the lesson you want to grade. That's one extra step compared with grading a single lesson; the rest of the process is the same.
Need help?
These steps will get you started with grading and returning scores. If you have questions, reach out to the Kira team.