At a glance
More writing practice
Teachers assign more writing than before, and grading no longer sets the ceiling
Time back for teachers
150-180 essays per response set, feedback in hours
Student confidence and revision
Students revise more and internalize rubrics, including EB and SPED students
Fair, consistent scoring
Grading bias removed across classrooms
Teacher adoption and advocacy
Teachers train their peers and volunteer PD sessions
Cross-subject expansion
Social studies built cause-and-effect rubrics, and retention improved
Cynthia Hinojos-Smith, Curriculum Coordinator, Secondary ELAR
“The students have used [CoGrader’s] feedback to help with the constructive response. We saw a lot of growth in the retesters than we did in the previous year... Last year we had 9% retesters that passed for English One, and this year we had 34%.”
Background
Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD serves 2,882 students across four campuses in Pecos, Texas. Like many small districts, it had identified writing as the critical growth area in its secondary classrooms: students were not writing often enough, and when they did, many struggled to understand what strong writing looked like or how their work would be evaluated. Expectations varied from classroom to classroom, so students never saw one consistent standard to aim at.
The challenge: 180 essays at a time
The district’s diagnosis was blunt: teachers weren’t assigning enough writing practice, and grading was what was standing in the way. A single constructive-response assignment meant 150 to 180 essays for a teacher to read and score, most of it on nights and weekends. Feedback reached students slowly, and sometimes not at all, so revision windows closed before anyone could act on them.
Students felt the other side of it. They didn’t see enough strong writing to know what it looked like, and they didn’t understand how rubrics would evaluate them. Fewer writing assignments meant slower skill growth, which made each round of grading heavier still.
“One of the big emphasis was the writing. That was the big thing that we had to really focus on because there wasn’t much. The kids weren’t really writing. And then if they were, they didn’t know what they needed to be writing.”
The timing made it harder. The district had just adopted a new curriculum (Bluebonnet) and a new testing platform (IXL Diagnostics) at the elementary level, and leadership deliberately chose not to hand another tool to teachers who were already stretched thin. Anything new had to earn its place.
“We’re trying not to drown.”
The turnaround
The district rolled CoGrader out where the need was sharpest: secondary English Language Arts. After training, teachers moved from onboarding to regular use within weeks, running all their constructive responses, CFAs, and CBAs through CoGrader, inside the Google Classroom workflows they already had.
Cynthia Hinojos-Smith, the curriculum coordinator who leads secondary ELAR for the district, did not start out as a believer. She rates the platform a 9.5 out of 10 today, but she is candid about where she began.
“At the beginning, I was very scared of it. I didn’t understand it. I thought it was very hard... Now doing it, hearing the teachers, I give it a 9.5, close to a 10. I didn’t know what I was so scared of.”
Her teachers got there faster. They compare feedback, swap rubrics, and show each other what CoGrader caught.
“They share it. They’re like little kids when they’re playing with toys.”
For students, the change showed up as clarity. With rubric-aligned feedback arriving while the assignment was still alive, they knew exactly what to revise and why. They revised more frequently, wrote with greater confidence, and started to internalize what the rubric actually expected of them.
Scoring evened out across classrooms, too. Shared rubrics and consistent feedback helped teachers catch grading that ran too critical in one room and too easy in the next.
The workflow did not stay inside English Language Arts. Social studies teachers adopted rubrics focused on cause-and-effect reasoning, using written explanations to help students retain content, with the same fast feedback loop behind them.
The results
The clearest outcome came from the students who are hardest to move. Students retaking the STAAR English I end-of-course exam are, by definition, the students who have already struggled with it once. In the first year of district-wide use, their pass rate nearly quadrupled.
Teachers now assign more writing than they did before CoGrader. Feedback no longer sets the ceiling: a class set that once ate a week of evenings turns around in hours.
9% → 34%
Retester pass rate, year over year
150-180
Essays per response set, with detailed feedback back in hours instead of days
100%
Of secondary CFAs and CBAs graded through CoGrader
Weeks
From training to regular classroom use across secondary ELA
9.5/10
The curriculum coordinator’s rating after year one
The gains reached the district office as well. Assessment work that used to mean wrestling with spreadsheets — CSV exports, downloads, thousands of responses — stopped being a project.
“For me, it was the assessment part. Having the CSV and download and all that. Now it’s a piece of cake.”
When the district needed assessment data for its Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) submission, CoGrader adjusted the export format to match the columns the state required, so staff did not have to edit every file by hand.
“You definitely saved our lives on our TIA... it wouldn’t have been done without you guys.”
Asked how the teachers feel about CoGrader a year into the rollout, Cynthia does not hedge.
“They are believers. They love it. They’ve even trained other teachers to use it.”
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