Free Essay Grader and Checker

This essay checker online for free scores your draft in your browser: paste text or upload a .docx/.pdf. Parsing happens on-device — the file never leaves it. Choose a mode and word limit, then run the check.

What you can enter

• Paste ≤20,000 characters, or upload a .docx/.pdf (≤10 MB, 30 pages)
• Mode: College application essay · Coursework essay · Research paper
• Word limit: defaults to 650 (Common App); presets for UC PIQ (350) and custom

How the rubric scores you This one publishes the signal behind each sub-score: an integer 0–5, summed and multiplied by four for a 100-point ceiling.

• Thesis and focus: one arguable claim, held throughout.
• Structure and progression: paragraph rhythm, whether the ending returns to the opening.
• Evidence and specificity: named people, places, numbers per 100 words.
• Voice and originality: matches against a published cliché list — "a moment that changed my life forever," "little did I know," "in today's society," "it was in that moment I realized," "the sky's the limit," "opened my eyes to a whole new world."
• Mechanics: comma splices, run-ons, fragments, agreement errors and homophone slips, per 500 words.

The right rail flags sentences as it scores — a cliché match, a filler opener, a passive chain, a long sentence — so you can fix a paragraph sentence by sentence.

Sample 1 — College application essay (composite sample written by GradeDraft)

Every Saturday for four years, I opened Nasr's Bakery at five in the morning to help my uncle prep dough before the ovens woke the block up. For the first eighteen months I measured flour by scoop, not by weight, in a hurry to get to the shaping table. My uncle never corrected me out loud. He weighed my scoops on the digital scale, in front of me, until I watched the number swing from 210 grams to 340 grams to 180 grams over three mornings — the same recipe, three different breads.

The morning I finally weighed every scoop first, our baguettes held their crumb structure for the first time all winter. I remember standing at the cooling rack, cutting into a loaf that wasn't dense or gummy, just even, all the way through. My uncle didn't say much. He handed me the scale and told me to keep it.

That scale sits on my desk now, next to my calculus homework, and I use it the way I use a lab balance in chemistry: not because a teacher told me to, but because I know what happens to a result when you skip the step that feels slow. Precision isn't a trait I was born with. It's a discipline I built one weighed scoop at a time, on mornings when it would have been easier to guess.

When my robotics team's arm mechanism failed at regionals last spring, three teammates wanted to rebuild it overnight, guessing at tolerances to save time. I asked for forty minutes to measure the gear ratio against the spec sheet first. We found the error — a half-millimeter gap nobody had checked — and fixed it in ten minutes. I didn't win that argument because I was louder. I won it because I'd learned, at five in the morning in a bakery, that the slow step is usually the one that saves you.

Score: 84/100 — Strong

• Thesis and focus: 4/5 — precision as a built discipline, stated once, held across both anecdotes.
• Structure and progression: 3/5 — most paragraphs open on a topic sentence, but the close sits beside the opening image rather than returning to it.
• Evidence and specificity: 5/5 — named business, exact weights, named competition, half-millimeter tolerance.
• Voice and originality: 4/5 — clean sentence-length variance, no cliché-list matches, one filler opener flagged.
• Mechanics: 5/5 — no comma splices, no fragments, no agreement errors.
• Flags: 0 cliché · 1 filler opener · 0 passive chains · 0 sentences over 35 words · 1 vague noun ("the real work").

Sample 2 — Coursework essay (composite sample written by GradeDraft)

In today's world, it's important for students to understand money, and personal finance should probably be a required course before graduation, because a lot of students don't know how credit cards work or what a good interest rate looks like, and this is a problem that schools could fix pretty easily.

Many students graduate without knowing how to file taxes, and this can be a big problem for them later. Some schools offer personal finance as an elective, but electives don't reach every student, and the students who need it most are often the ones who don't sign up. It seems like the students who are already good with money are the ones who take the class, which kind of defeats the purpose, if you think about it.

There are a lot of reasons this matters. Credit card debt is a real issue for young adults, student loans are confusing, and budgeting is a skill a lot of adults say they wish they'd learned earlier. If schools required this course, more students would graduate with the tools they need, and that seems like a good use of the time schools have.

Some people might say the schedule is already full, that's a fair point. But other required classes, like health class, arguably cover material that's less immediately useful than compound interest, so there's room to make the case for a swap. Requiring the class wouldn't fix every financial mistake young people make, but it would give them a foundation, and a foundation is better than nothing, which is what most students currently get.

In conclusion, personal finance should be required because it's important and useful and would help students in the real world after they graduate.

Score: 44/100 — Developing

• Thesis and focus: 3/5 — claim present but hedged twice ("probably," "seems like").
• Structure and progression: 2/5 — weak topic sentences; the close restates the thesis without returning to an opening image.
• Evidence and specificity: 1/5 — no named sources or numbers; "a lot of," "a big problem," "a real issue" stand in for specifics.
• Voice and originality: 2/5 — six cliché or filler matches, including "in today's world" and "in conclusion."
• Mechanics: 3/5 — one comma splice, one run-on-adjacent sentence.
• Flags: 3 cliché · 2 filler openers · 1 passive chain · 1 sentence over 35 words · 2 repeated openers · 4 vague nouns.