Pensieve Grader: An AI-Powered, Ready-to-Use Platform for Effortless Handwritten STEM Grading

Abstract: Grading handwritten, open-ended responses remains a major bottleneck in large university STEM courses. We introduce Pensieve (https://www.pensieve.co), an AI-assisted grading platform that leverages LLMs to transcribe and evaluate student work, providing instructors with rubric-aligned scores, transcriptions, and confidence ratings. Unlike prior tools that focus narrowly on specific tasks like transcription or rubric generation, Pensieve supports the entire grading pipeline-from scanned student submissions to final feedback-within a human-in-the-loop interface. Pensieve has been deployed in real-world courses at over 20 institutions and has graded more than 300,000 student responses. We present system details and empirical results across four core STEM disciplines: Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. Our findings show that Pensieve reduces grading time by an average of 65%, while maintaining a 95.4% agreement rate with instructor-assigned grades for high-confidence predictions.