GroupMark - free Gradescope alternative

I'm a high school Physics teacher. I've been using Gradescope to help mark tests and exams for years, but it has some missing features and is (now) crazy expensive. So I vibe coded an alternative.

GroupMark is a Windows app, rather than a website. No student data leaves the user's device.

The teacher makes a class, and assigns students to the class. They can have email addresses, or can just be names.

Then the workflow for each task is:

• Create a task, and 'upload' a blank copy of the test to be marked.
• Manually highlight answer regions, and assign each one a maximum score. (Or let AI do it for you.) (!)
• Students complete the test as usual on paper. Scan them with a photocopier and upload the pdf to GroupMark.
• GroupMark splits the bulk upload(s) into individual tests.
• Using local handwriting recognition, GroupMark tries to pair students with their own test. Or you can do it manually. (This works really well on my Mac; less well on Windows.)
• The teacher marks the tests, question by question. GroupMark can try to automatically group similar answers, to speed this up (locally). AI can also suggest possible answers and marking schemes. Importantly, the teacher does the marking and can do all this manually, override the suggestions, etc. Again, no student data leaves the device. (!)
• Alternately to all of this, you can also generate and mark multiple choice question bubble sheets, all locally on device. (!)
• Questions can also be tagged, eg with content descriptors, skills, performance standards they address, etc. This can also be manual or done by AI. (!)
• When the test is marked, the teacher can see a detailed breakdown. Average scores for each question, scores by student, scores by tag.
• The teacher can optionally send marked versions of the tests to students, if student emails and a teacher email login have been added.
• Tags can be used on multiple tasks, so you can see how a student is progressing with a particular skill or concept over the year. (!)

Lots of these features (!) are missing from Gradescope - the grouping answers is a paid feature, but all of the AI-assisted features have to be done manually on Gradescope, and Gradescope’s tagging is pretty limited (and manual).

I was originally planning on monetising this but decided that was, frankly, too hard. Schools don't like using untested software. So it's free. You can find GroupMark on the Windows Store.

Let me know if you have any questions, happy to explain my logic or do any troubleshooting.

Submitted July 11, 2026 at 07:45AM by ThePatchedFool https://ift.tt/vcCKrMY