Said It Here

How to grade unreadable student handwriting

Unreadable handwriting makes student work impossible to grade fairly, forcing teachers to waste time calling students up to decipher their own writing. This prevents efficient assessment and stalls the entire grading process when assignments cannot be deciphered at all.

Overview
People affected2 accounts across 1 forum
Workarounds found2 items attempted
Community agreement3 total upvotes

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

Found another way around this?

Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.

  1. 1
    marking the unreadable work as wrong
    Did this help you?
  2. 2
    calling students up to read their own work aloud
    Did this help you?

In their words

Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.

r/Teachers2 people · September 2026

“If I cant read it, I cant grade it.”source ↗

TeacherGuy1980 · r/Teachers · 61 upvotes

“you are not alone. I have called students up to read their work to me..and they CANT!!!! its that bad”source ↗

Born-Bowl-3847 · r/Teachers · 1 upvotes

Where this came up

People with this problem also raised