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Grade essays with your Apple Pencil. Import a stack of student PDFs, mark them up by hand, let a reusable rubric add up the score, and send the graded papers back — all on your iPad, none of it in the cloud.
Why Penmark
Marking papers by hand is faster and kinder than typing comments into a browser form. So most teachers already do it: download the submissions, annotate them in a general-purpose note app, then upload them again and retype every score.
That workaround is where the friction lives. Note apps don't know what a class is, what a rubric is, or what a grade is — so you end up juggling a reader, a spreadsheet, and your LMS for a single stack of essays. The purpose-built alternatives are the opposite problem: web tools locked to an institutional subscription, with student work sitting on someone else's server.
Penmark is the missing middle. It's a real iPad app built around the Apple Pencil, it understands courses and rubrics and grades, and it keeps every page on your device.
What you can do
Grade the way you already do. Import a whole class set of PDFs at once. Mark them up with the Pencil — ink, highlight, notes — exactly like paper. Flip between pages; your marks save themselves.
Attach a rubric that does the arithmetic. Build it once, reuse it every assignment. Tap to award points per criterion and Penmark totals the score, works out the percentage, and assigns the letter grade. A lightweight gradebook shows every student and the class average at a glance.
Keep your feedback on tap. The comment bank stores the notes you write over and over, sorted by how often you use them, ready for the next paper.
Hand work back anywhere. Export a flattened PDF with your marks baked in, and a CSV of the grades. Email them, drop them in Files, or upload them to whatever LMS your school runs — Penmark doesn't lock you into any of them.
Built for
Professors, adjuncts, K-12 teachers, and TAs who grade written work — essays, problem sets, lab reports, anything that arrives as a PDF. If you already grade on an iPad with a Pencil and keep a separate spreadsheet for the scores, Penmark replaces that whole arrangement.
Privacy and trust
Penmark has no account, no server, and no cloud. Student PDFs, your marks, rubrics, comments, and grades are stored only on your iPad. There is no analytics, no tracking, and not a single third-party SDK. Its App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected, and that is the literal truth — nothing leaves the device unless you choose to export a graded paper or a grades file.
That matters more here than in most apps. Student work is protected educational material, and handing it to a third-party service is a decision you shouldn't have to make just to write in the margins. With Penmark you never do.
Get the app
Penmark is free to download and grades one course in full. A single one-time purchase — Penmark Unlimited, $24.99 — lifts the limit to unlimited courses. It is not a subscription, it never renews, and it is yours to keep.
Coming soon to the App Store.