Mark handwritten student work from scanned PDFs

Turn a paper assessment into a reviewable marking set

TicknClick accepts handwritten student work as scanned PDFs and uses your PDF mark scheme to suggest marks and individual feedback. This gives you a draft to check against the original work. Handwriting recognition and AI marking can make mistakes, so the teacher reviews every submission before finalising.

Prepare a clear scan

Check that each answer is readable, the pages are in the right order and no response has been cut off. Remove identifying details before uploading. If names are on separate cover pages, the cover-page exclusion option can remove those selected pages before AI marking. Names elsewhere in a response must be removed separately.

Combined PDF or individual PDFs?

Use a combined PDF when every student’s paper has the same number of pages. Check the page count carefully so each submission is split at the right boundary. Use individual PDFs when submissions have different lengths. Supply the PDF mark scheme for the assessment alongside the student work.

Review handwriting and mark-scheme interpretation

Compare each suggested mark with the scanned answer and the scheme in the review workspace. Look closely at ambiguous handwriting, numbers, calculations and valid alternative wording. The system can flag uncertainty in these areas, but flags are prompts for review rather than proof that all other answers are correct. Edit the suggested mark and feedback whenever needed.

Give students feedback you have checked

After reviewing and confirming every submission, finalise the marking set. Export the marks and percentages to a spreadsheet in submission order, and download an individual Word feedback document for each student. These documents contain the reviewed marks and comments, ready for your usual school feedback workflow.

When to use digital text marking instead

If the work is a typed document without diagrams or embedded equations, the digital text route may be appropriate. It accepts individual DOCX, TXT, ODT, RTF, Markdown and text-based PDF files. Use the scanned PDF route for content that needs to be read visually, and check that the uploaded document preserves everything needed to assess the response.

Explore the marking workflows

• AI marking & automarking for teachers
• AI marking for handwritten student work
• AI essay marking & paragraph feedback for teachers

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