Dec 9, 2025
Michael Harbaugh
Introduction
Over the past year, we’ve heard a consistent theme from teachers: when their AI-enabled teaching assistants have clear expectations for what student work looks like look like, their AI grading and feedback assistant gets better; feedback becomes more accurate, scores are more consistent, and teachers feel more confident using EnlightenAI.
We have also heard that teachers don’t always have a readily available set of student writing samples to train their AI assistant, and developing these from scratch can be a time-consuming challenge. That’s why we’re excited to share a new update that makes it dramatically easier to create high-quality anchor examples of student work - right inside EnlightenAI.
Before we dive in! If you want a refresher on how anchor examples work (and why they matter), you can learn more here.
Prefer to see it in action? Watch this quick video walkthrough!
What’s new: generating AI writing samples
Sometimes the best student writing samples are stuck in last year’s folders. Sometimes they’re on paper. Sometimes they don’t exist yet, because the assignment is brand new.
For all those times, we’ve built a way to get you from “I need examples” to “I have five usable anchors” in minutes.
When you click the Upload / Sample Work button during assignment setup, you’ll now see a new option: “Generate with AI”
Clicking “Generate with AI” opens a new window that’s designed specifically for teachers who want targeted, rubric-aligned student samples.
First, you’ll see the rubric you already added to the assignment. You’ll be able to view the rubric categories and the scoring levels you’ve defined, and define the scores you’re looking for in each writing sample. Choose your response level, and then add custom instructions to shape the sample.
This is where you can get very specific. You can include guidance like:
Word count: “Make this student response between 350–450 words”
Reading level / Lexile band: “grade 8 writing” or “advanced high school level”
The type of strengths or areas of growth you want to see: strong introductory sentences, solid use of transition phrases, grammar errors, limited textual evidence, off-topic reasoning, etc
Any other constraints, instructions, or context you want the student writing to follow
In other words: you’re not generating generic “student writing.” You’re generating a first draft that you can edit and adjust to end up with the kind of realistic sample that helps you clearly define what each score point looks like in your class You can focus in on the specific areas of writing that you’re grading for, and let EnlightenAI help with the basics of creating the draft.
You can generate up to five samples, edit them as much as you’d like, and save them as your anchor examples. As always, with EnlightenAI, you’re always in control of the final content and instructional process.
Once those samples are in place, you can continue with the workflow you already know: train and calibrate your AI grading and feedback assistant, review the AI feedback, refine it, and make sure it matches exactly how you want to grade and support students.
Why this matters
Anchor examples are one of the strongest ways to ensure your EnlightenAI grading and feedback assistants give high-quality feedback that is consistently at the right level of rigor. We want to ensure that more teachers can easily find the time to use this powerful feature, and we hope that these AI-generated examples make it faster and easier to use.
You no longer need to pause assignment creation because you don’t have exemplars ready. You can create them on demand, tune them to your rubric, and then refine them with your professional judgment.
The result: a more calibrated, more confident, more time-saving setup process, and a better experience for students once the assignment goes live.
What comes next: our vision
This update is part of a bigger vision: making content creation in EnlightenAI easier, faster, and more collaborative - without sacrificing teacher control or instructional quality.
We believe the future of great teaching tools isn’t just “AI that generates things.” It’s a platform where teachers can:
Create high-quality materials efficiently
Calibrate and refine how the AI supports learning
Share what works with colleagues
Build on the best examples across classrooms, schools, and communities
As we keep investing in teacher collaboration and content sharing, our goal is to grow a richer library of high-quality resources, including more rubric-aligned assignments that come with a pre-trained AI assistant, ready to help grade. We’re focusing on building for AP topics, SBAC test prep, and other state tests. Now, you can build these resources yourself, faster than ever!
If you have a strong set of assignments that you want to share with other teachers, we would love to hear from you! We’re excited to keep building this library with (and for) the educator community. Reach out to us and we can get your content shared!
As always, we really appreciate your feedback, and we want to know what we can do to make EnlightenAI even better.
If you’d like to reach out, share ideas, or show us how you’re using this feature!
