How Guided Scholar works, what students experience, what teachers can see, and how it fits into classroom instruction as teacher-connected support, not a private student AI tool.
Guided Scholar is structured educational workflow infrastructure with three modes. Each operates within a teacher-visible, assignment-bounded framework, students are not accessing a general-purpose AI chatbot. They are working inside a structured feedback system that the teacher can monitor in real time.
Teach Me walks students through an assignment one section at a time (introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion), providing rubric-aligned feedback after each submission. Students can submit at any stage, receive feedback, revise, and resubmit before moving forward. Draft history and revision depth are visible to the teacher throughout.
Coach Me lets students submit a complete draft (written essay, spreadsheet, or presentation) and receive feedback with the option to revise and resubmit multiple times. It covers the same rubric categories as Teach Me but without the section-by-section scaffolding. No pre-writing assistance is provided; this mode evaluates independent work.
ACT Mode includes both an untimed scaffolded practice workflow and a timed 40-minute test simulation, both scored against the actual ACT rubric with immediate feedback.
No. Guided Scholar cannot generate student content. This is a design constraint, not a policy setting. The student writes every word of their submission. The system responds to what the student wrote, it does not produce writing on their behalf. It is not an autonomous grading system, and it does not replace teacher judgment. The teacher determines how feedback is applied and how student work is evaluated.
What the system does provide: a summary of what the student wrote, rubric scores by category, specific strengths, specific areas for improvement, an example revision suggestion showing the student's original sentence alongside a stronger version, prioritized next steps, and a downloadable feedback package.
Guided Scholar supports written essays, spreadsheets, and presentations across any subject area. The system detects the assignment type from the instructions the student enters and recommends an appropriate template: essay, reflection essay, short response, class presentation, service log, and others. A research paper template is in development and will be added in a future update.
Guided Scholar currently supports over a dozen templates. If you have assignment types not in the current library, you can submit a suggestion directly. New templates are evaluated based on how broadly they apply across grade levels and subject areas. Suggest a template →
The ACT mode uses a bank of 20 prepared prompts covering a range of argumentation topics. The ACT Writing Practice mode is untimed; the ACT Practice Test mode runs a timed 40-minute session.
For general writing assignments, feedback is organized across five categories: Organization, Clarity of Ideas, Supporting Details and Evidence, Grammar and Mechanics, and Overall Effectiveness. Each category is scored on a 1–5 scale with written explanation.
For ACT Writing Practice and ACT Practice Test, feedback uses the official ACT four-domain rubric: Ideas and Analysis, Development and Support, Organization, and Language Use and Conventions. An ACT composite score and structure check are also provided.
Yes. Because students can submit for feedback at any point (after just the introduction, after two body paragraphs, at any stage of the draft), you can direct students to work on a specific element this week. For example: tell students to write and revise only their introduction until the thesis is clear and the opening is strong. Students submit, receive feedback on that section, revise, and resubmit as many times as needed before moving forward.
This makes Guided Scholar compatible with phased writing instruction, you can align it to how you're already teaching rather than restructuring around the tool.
The teacher dashboard shows you. For every student assignment, you can see: how many drafts they submitted, when they last worked, how their revision was classified (substantial, moderate, surface-only, or no revision), a side-by-side comparison of any two drafts, and revision insights including word count change, whether new structure was added, and whether evidence improved.
The dashboard also automatically flags students who received feedback but have not submitted a revision, so you can identify who needs a direct nudge without reading every draft.
In school-account deployments, this visibility is the default. Student practice inside Guided Scholar is class-linked, not a private activity outside your oversight. You see the work, the revision history, and how students responded to feedback.
Yes, and this is one of its strongest use cases. The ACT Writing Practice mode gives students a real ACT-style prompt, planning boxes for brainstorming and outlining, paragraph-by-paragraph drafting sections, and immediate rubric feedback scored against the four official ACT domains. Students can practice as many times as they need.
The ACT Practice Test mode runs a timed 40-minute session with auto-submission and delivers the same rubric feedback immediately. The system also runs a structure check, flagging whether the thesis was stated, a perspective was addressed, evidence was provided, and counterargument was considered.
Both modes give students more ACT writing practice cycles than most classrooms can provide within the school day, with feedback tied directly to the criteria the actual test uses.
Students can export feedback in three formats: a text file (.txt), a Word document (.docx), or Google Docs-Compatible HTML. Export content includes the structured feedback — summary, strengths, improvements, revision suggestions, and next steps — without internal scoring metadata or submission history. Students can download from any feedback view in the app.
No. Student submission data is not used to train any AI model. It is used to generate feedback for that student's draft in that session. In school-account deployments, student submissions are visible to the responsible teacher, this is not private, unmonitored AI access. No student data is shared with or retained by third-party AI providers beyond the single exchange required to generate feedback.
Student submission data is kept for six months in active storage, archived for an additional six months, and then permanently deleted. Total maximum retention is twelve months from the date of submission.
Guided Scholar is designed with FERPA requirements in mind. Because the system is currently in a beta pilot phase, formal compliance documentation (including a complete privacy policy and student data agreement) is being developed alongside the teacher module and account system.
Schools and districts with specific FERPA or COPPA requirements should contact us directly before piloting. We are committed to working through district-specific data handling requirements before any broader deployment.
Guided Scholar evaluates whatever the student submits. If a student submits AI-generated text, the system will evaluate it, and the teacher dashboard will show the revision history, which may reveal patterns inconsistent with genuine student work.
Guided Scholar is not an AI detection tool and does not claim to identify AI-generated content. It is a feedback and revision system. Whether to use it in ways that require original student writing is a classroom policy decision that remains with the teacher.
Assigned Work is created by the teacher and tied to a class, workflow, title, instructions, and assignment context. Students receive it through the class interface and work within the structure the teacher configured.
Self-Initiated Work is started by the student, but school-account activity must be tied to a class and remains teacher-visible. Students can practice beyond what was formally assigned, but that practice is class-linked and part of the school record — not private AI use detached from school oversight.
When a teacher marks the current version reviewed, it signals that they have seen the student’s latest submission. The reviewed status resets automatically when the student submits a new draft or revision. That reset means “reviewed” always refers to the latest version — not the thread at some point in the past.
This keeps the review queue current. A student who revised after feedback appears as needing review again, which is the correct state.
Yes. Teachers can close Assigned Work from Manage Assignments. Closed Assigned Work is hidden from student selection and blocks new submissions or revisions unless the teacher reopens it. Students cannot close teacher-assigned work themselves. This gives teachers control over the assignment lifecycle without needing to delete anything.
Reporting is organized into two tracks: Assigned Work reports and Self-Initiated Student Work reports. Within each, teachers can see participation, student rubric growth, rubric category strengths and weaknesses, and recurring feedback patterns.
For grades 9–12 classes using ACT workflows, reporting also includes ACT score progression and ACT category strengths and weaknesses across submissions. Reporting is designed to surface class-level patterns without requiring teachers to read every individual submission.
Non-ACT workflows use grade-level context to calibrate feedback tone, expectations, and next steps. The three grade bands are upper elementary (grades 4–5), middle school (grades 6–8), and high school (grades 9–12). Feedback in each band matches what is developmentally appropriate for that level while keeping the specific assignment scope at the center.
ACT Writing Practice and ACT Practice Test workflows are visible only for grades 9–12 and always use ACT-aligned scoring criteria regardless of the grade band setting.
Yes. Continue Work lets students return to earlier submissions, load the latest saved draft, revise, and submit the next version. Each submission becomes a new version within the same thread, so the revision history is preserved. If the most recent version doesn’t load correctly, the system falls back to the latest available draft text from an earlier version while preserving the version metadata.
The teacher can see every version and compare any two drafts side by side.