Manual Grading in Nearpod

published by Mike Neumire on 3/18/2026

Nearpod has for a while been the standard for facilitating direct instruction. That fleeting face-to-face time you have with students is so valuable yet so hard to structure. Nearpod solves that problem. If Nearpod is new to you, check out these other resources first. If you've used it, you probably know that its weakness is individual feedback and grading. That's been okay, because it does its main job of structuring your lessons, but it has so much interactivity so it would be nice to be able to assign a grade to a student's efforts. Now you can! You could always see a grade for those questions with defined answers, like multiple choice quizzes and "Time to Climb" games. In that spirit, Nearpod added a "add a grade" button to the open ended question, draw it slide, drag and drop, and math manipulatives. The grading system itself is very simple, letting you choose between three grading options that essentially follow a stop light structure: approved, needs clarification, and needs approvement (green, yellow, red). This simple structure makes sense for Nearpod, because it is an "in the moment" kind of tool and you don't want to get caught parsing through the differences between an 86 and an 87 in the middle of a lesson. Check out this new feature below: