How does Grade Coach actually work?

Four steps. (1) Snap a photo of student work, or drop in an image. (2) The AI reads it and shows you a rubric you can edit. (3) It grades against that rubric. (4) You review every grade, edit anything, and export to CSV, PDF, or Google Sheets.

What kind of student work can I grade with Grade Coach?

Any student work you upload can be graded. The clearer your rubric details, the better the result. Examples: worksheets, short-answer questions, essays, math problems, science responses, reading comprehension, vocab quizzes, full tests.

Do I need to sign up to use Grade Coach?

No. You can use every Grade Coach tool without an account. If you would like to save your work across sessions, you can sign in. It is optional.

What happens to student work I upload to Grade Coach?

Private by default. We do not sell student work, share it with other teachers or schools, or train any AI on it. See the privacy page for the full details.

Can I trust what the Grade Coach AI produces?

You are the final check. Every grade and every generated worksheet is shown to you for review before anything is final. Think of Grade Coach as a coach: it gives you the first pass, you decide.

What does Grade Coach cost?

Every tool runs on one shared pool of credits. You start free: 10 credits with no account, plus 10 more each month when you sign up. A graded paper is 1 credit; a worksheet is 5. Need more, you can top up any time ($10 = 400 credits that never expire) or subscribe for monthly credits (Pro $10/mo with 500 credits, Power $20/mo with 1,200). No credit card to start.

Does Grade Coach work for ESL and international-school teachers?

Yes. That is the founder's background. Grade Coach is designed around rubrics you set, not language fluency, and it understands classroom conventions that vary by country.

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edtech

Grade Coach vs Brisk Teaching: Chrome extension or web app?

Brisk Teaching is the most-installed teacher AI Chrome extension in the world. Grade Coach is a web app. They are different shapes, and that matters more than features. Here is the honest comparison.

Enzo · May 19, 2026 · 7 min read

Side-by-side flat illustration: a browser window with a narrow extension sidebar on the left, versus a standalone gradebook card with a locked rubric pin on the right, contrasting the Chrome-extension shape with a purpose-built web app

Brisk Teaching is, by install count, the most successful teacher AI product on the Chrome Web Store: 1,000,000+ installs, 4.7 stars from 729 ratings, and the listing copy claims "saved educators around the world over one million hours of time." Whatever your opinion of the product, you have to respect that distribution moat.

Grade Coach is a different shape: it is a web app, not a Chrome extension. That choice is the heart of how we differ. Let me make the case for both shapes honestly, then you can pick.

The case for Brisk: it lives inside Google Docs

Brisk's killer move is that it works inside Google Docs, Google Slides, and a few other Google surfaces. Highlight a student response, click a button in your browser sidebar, get feedback. It never asks you to leave the document you are already in. For teachers whose grading happens primarily inside Google Docs, this in-place workflow is genuinely lower-friction than any web app can be.

Brisk also has a feature breadth advantage. The extension covers rubric generation, feedback, leveling, simplifying text, generating quizzes, and dozens of smaller utilities. If you teach in a Google-first school and you want one extension that covers a wide spread of small teacher tasks, Brisk is the strongest answer on the market.

The case for Grade Coach: it works on paper

Brisk assumes student work is already digital. Grade Coach assumes it might be on paper, photographed from your phone, in handwriting.

That is the bet. Most international classrooms (where the founder of Grade Coach taught for 10+ years) still hand back paper. Half of K-12 still uses paper for first-draft writing and almost all of K-12 uses paper for math working. A Chrome extension cannot grade a stack of paper. A web app with a camera-first upload flow can.

Flat illustration contrasting a browser document with an extension sidebar against a phone camera scanning paper into a structured grade sheet — The product shape matters: in-document help is best for digital work, while paper stacks need a camera-first grading flow.

Beyond the paper-vs-digital split, Grade Coach is also built differently:

Locked rubric across the class set. Every paper graded against the exact same rubric interpretation locked from paper one. Brisk's per-document interactions do not have this concept (each prompt is independent).
One credit pool across grading + worksheets + parent reports + practice + class deep-dive. Brisk is a feature menu; Grade Coach is a single workflow spine that links the graded substrate into per-student insights.
Editable spreadsheet output by default. Grade Coach finishes a class set on a familiar grade-sheet you can edit, export to CSV, or copy to Google Sheets. Brisk's outputs are per-document comments; gathering them into one place is on you.

The honest tradeoffs

Brisk has the bigger user base and the Chrome Web Store discoverability moat. If you ask three teachers in a US public school what AI tool they have tried, at least one will say Brisk. Word-of-mouth is a real advantage we do not have today.

Grade Coach does not (yet) have a Chrome extension. If your grading workflow is Google-Docs-first and you do not have a stack of paper to deal with, Brisk's in-document UX is hard to beat.

On pricing, Brisk has a free tier and a paid Plus tier. Grade Coach has a free tier (10 papers, no account) and a credit-pool paid model. Different shapes, similar entry prices.

How to actually decide

Ask yourself: what does the stack of work I am grading look like? If it is Google Docs from a 1:1 Chromebook school, Brisk fits the workflow you already have. If it is paper, photographed from your phone, or a mix of paper and Google Classroom submissions, Grade Coach fits.

Both have free tiers. Try them on a real assignment, not on a hypothetical one. If you pick Brisk, you are picking a well-engineered product with massive teacher adoption. If you want to try Grade Coach on a stack of paper, the first 10 papers are free, no card and no account required.