Free-response grading, first pass done before you open it.
Assign a free-response question to your class. AI reads every submission and proposes a rubric score with a written justification for each point — quoting what the student actually wrote. You approve, override, or reject, one at a time or the whole class at once.
Nothing is recorded until you approve it. The teacher is in the loop by design, not by setting.
Free. No card, no trial, no per-seat pricing. Takes about a minute.
Set up in three steps
- 1
Create a class
Name it, pick one of the 42 AP courses, and you get a six-character join code.
- 2
Share the code
Students make a free account, enter the code, and land in your roster already enrolled in the course.
- 3
Assign something
A practice set, a lesson, a 3D lab, a free-response question, or a timed mock — with a due date and a point value.
What the AI first pass actually gives you
Grading free response is the part of the job that eats the evening. The model reads each submission against the same rubric you would use and returns, per rubric row:
- The points it would award, clamped to that row’s maximum — it cannot invent a score above the rubric.
- A justification that cites the student’s own words, so you can check it against the response in a second rather than re-reading from scratch.
- What was missing when a point was not earned, not just that it was wrong.
Proposed grades sit in a queue marked unapproved. Tick the ones you agree with and approve in bulk, open any single submission to change a row, or ignore the whole thing and grade by hand. A student sees nothing until you approve.
Open a sample classOne roster, the whole picture
Open a class and every student is one row: lessons completed, multiple-choice accuracy, their projected 1–5 from measured work only, current streak, and every free-response submission waiting to be graded.
Projections are earned, not entered
A student cannot self-report a score. The 1–5 comes only from questions they actually answered, and stays hidden until there is enough evidence to mean something.
See who has stopped
Streaks and last-active dates make the student who quietly disengaged in October visible in October.
Assignment status per student
Who has opened it, who has finished it, who has not started.
Nothing to install
No extension, no district IT ticket, no gradebook integration to configure.
What your students get
Counted from what is on the site right now, not a roadmap:
The scored investigations are the part no other free site has: the student runs a simulation, records their own measurements, and writes a conclusion that is graded against their data — so a right answer from wrong numbers does not earn the point. Good lab-report practice when a real lab period is not available.
Before you put this in front of a class
- We are independent. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the College Board. Our questions and rubrics are ours, written to the published frameworks.
- Our practice is not a released exam. Where we know a real exam’s structure we state it next to our own; where we have not verified it, we say that instead of implying a number.
- Projected scores are estimates. They are accuracy bands on our question pool, not College Board cut scores, and the site says so wherever one appears.
- AI grading needs a key. It is off unless the site owner has configured it. Everything else — classes, assignments, rosters, manual grading — works either way.
Questions teachers ask
Is it actually free?
Yes, and there is no card, no trial and no per-seat charge. Every course, lesson, question bank, lab and the whole teacher portal are free to use right now. We would rather tell you what it costs today than promise what it will cost forever.
Do my students need to buy anything?
No. A student needs a free account and your six-character join code. Nothing they use is paywalled.
Does the AI decide my students’ grades?
No. It proposes a score and nothing is recorded until you approve it. You can change any row, reject the whole thing, or grade by hand and never use it. The approval step is structural, not a setting you can accidentally turn off.
Is this affiliated with the College Board?
No. Ladder 2 Five is independent and not endorsed by the College Board. We follow the published course frameworks and link to official materials where they exist, but our practice questions and rubrics are ours.
What happens to my students’ work?
It stays in your class. You see the students who joined your class and their work in that course. We do not sell data and there is no advertising on the site.
Start with one class and one assignment
You will know within a week whether it saves you time. Nothing to cancel if it does not.