Introducing the Assignment Premium Add-Ons

Along with today’s PressPrimer Assignment 2.0 release, we’re thrilled to launch three new add-ons that turn the free plugin into a complete grading platform. The free plugin remains fully functional and unlimited on its own. What these add-ons do is add features for educators and organizations that simply aren’t available anywhere else in WordPress—or anywhere at this price point.

Here’s what’s new in the Educator, School, and Enterprise plugins.

AI-Assisted Grading (School)

This is the feature we’re most excited about, and for very good reason. Connect your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, pick the model you want to use, and the system integrates AI grading right into the workflow. It can run automatically in the background as assignments are submitted by students (with suggested scores and comments waiting for instructors to review when they open the grading interface), or it can be run manually for submissions on demand.

The system works seamlessly, and the grading system considers any instructions, guidelines, rubrics, and other records linked to the assignment when it undertakes the grading. It’s also fast and inexpensive; with a fast AI model, it takes around 10 seconds and 1 cent to grade a 1,000-word assignment. Even more advanced models can grade papers in under 20 seconds for less than 4 cents.

To make AI grading possible, the plugins include new libraries for parsing PDF and Word files. These allow formatting to be preserved and considered during grading. Behind the scenes, PDF files are sent intact to AI platforms for grading, but there are fallback systems to send text when that’s not possible. Automated retries, rate limiting, and a queueing system help to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Note that anything AI-generated is presented to instructors as suggestions only, and instructors can review and edit feedback before it’s presented to students.

AI Proofreading (School)

The new proofreading system checks submissions for spelling and grammar issues and returns a list of findings in the grading interface. Each issue shows the original text, corrected text, paragraph where it appears, and enough context to help instructors identify the problem within the submission. Each issue also has a button that adds it to the feedback sent to students so they can review their errors.

For long submissions, the proofreading system automatically chunks text into smaller volumes to help avoid timeouts. There’s a progress bar so instructors can see exactly where things stand.

Rubric Builder (Educator)

The new rubric system brings structured grading into the workflow. For each assignment, you can set up criteria that will determine exactly how assignments will be graded. And for each of those criteria, instructors can optionally set up performance levels. In other words, suppose “Writing Quality” should be worth 20% of a submission’s grade. Within that, an instructor can say that an “Excellent” submission is worth 18 points, a “Good” submission 15 points, and “Needs Work” is 10 points. As instructors are grading, they can just click the radio button associated with the level and that point value will be assigned (and, of course, values can be overridden, but having standardized levels helps to ensure consistency between submissions and graders).

The whole system helps students better understand how they will be graded, and instructors grade submissions faster and more consistently. Best of all, the AI grading system in the School plugin makes full use of rubric criteria and performance levels, and grade suggestions include recommended scores and feedback for all criteria.

Groups, Assignments, and Teachers (Educator)

Our group management and “Teacher” system (which exactly matches what’s in the PressPrimer Quiz plugins and is fully compatible with it) lets WordPress sites organize students into cohorts. Once groups exist, you can distribute assignments to groups, with controls for start date and due date. It also opens up group-based reporting so you can track activity for groups.

The Teacher role gives trusted users a view of /wp-admin/ that lets them create assignments, build rubrics, manage their groups, and report on submissions from their students only. If you’re a PressPrimer Quiz user and already have users with the Teacher role, the Assignment plugin uses the same system and just adds the extra capabilities to the role that it needs.

Audit Logging (Enterprise)

For organizations that need robust record-keeping, the audit logging system can track all key activities that happen on a site related to assignments. From assignment changes to rubric deletion to plugin settings changes, everything is captured in a read-only view to support compliance reviews. For sites with high data volumes, the retention period can be configured and old records are automatically pruned.

The log is privacy-conscious by design. No IP addresses are logged and no personal information other than user IDs is stored.

White-Label Branding (Enterprise)

The white-labeling system lets you make PressPrimer Assignment look and behave like your own native tool. From the plugin name to logos and colors, everything can be overridden to create something personalized to your site. There’s also a custom CSS tab for fine-tuning styles so everything has consistent branding.

What’s next

The 2.0 releases of all PressPrimer Assignment premium add-ons are available now. While the introductory features listed above are extremely powerful and beyond anything else available for WordPress assignments, we have some very big plans and these are just the starting points. To encourage early adoption and growth, we’re offering a launch sale through the end of May. The current prices are the lowest that we will ever offer on these plugins.

Over the next few months, we will release several major new versions that will focus on features like inline annotation, anonymous grading, plagiarism detection, lots of analytics, xAPI support, and more.

If you’re new to PressPrimer Assignment, try out the free plugin first. Give the premium add-ons a try as your needs evolve, and let us know how you’re using PressPrimer Assignment in the comments!