Education and Study · Blog · 🇺🇸 United States · via agentusecases.ai

Instructor grades assignments with Claude and reviews every score before posting

A cybersecurity instructor pulls submissions through the Canvas API, gets a score and comment per criterion from Claude, and only posts them after reviewing.

Profession: Teacher
Tools: API do Claude, Claude Code, Canvas
Source: vitraag.com ↗
Country: 🇺🇸 United States
Found via: agentusecases.ai (Alex Finn) ↗
Report date: March 12, 2026
Verified on: October 29, 2026

See more: AI for teachers

What they did

Vaibhav Bhandari, who teaches a course on hacking techniques at a college in California's Peralta system, used a personal Canvas API token to download his students' submissions. A script extracts the text from each file, or turns scanned PDFs into images, and sends it to Claude along with the rubric, stored in a YAML file. Claude returns a score per criterion, a first-person comment written as if from the instructor, and a flag when something looks off. He reviews everything in a spreadsheet and only then confirms the upload of grades to Canvas. He built the whole system in an afternoon with Claude Code.

How it went

On Lab 5, Claude flagged 13 of 22 submissions for review, mostly for suspected AI-written text or thin evidence. A first pass for a class takes a few minutes. According to the instructor, the scores were consistent with each other but not calibrated to the way he grades. For the final project he still read every submission and attended every presentation, and he came to them with more specific questions.

Good to know

To bring the scores closer to your own standard, add examples of what earns a 90 in your class to the rubric. The AI-text flag is a reason to look again, not a verdict. Before sending student work to an AI, check your school's rules on student data and the privacy laws that apply.

The prompt

I teach [subject] and I am grading [number] submissions for [assignment]. This is the rubric: [criteria with the maximum points for each]. For each submission I paste, give a score for each criterion with one sentence explaining why, write a short first-person comment as if I were talking to the student, and mark "REVIEW" if evidence is missing or something looks suspicious. Build a table with student, scores and comment. No grade is final: I will review everything before posting.

Replace what is in [brackets]. Prompt written by us from the account, not a literal copy of the source. Do not paste other people’s personal data (privacy laws such as LGPD and GDPR apply).

Summary in our own words. Results as stated in the original account; we have not tested or audited them. Read the source ↗ Case found via agentusecases.ai (Alex Finn); text and prompt rewritten by us. Found a mistake?