Most teachers arrive at PaperScorer with a folder of tests they have already written. Retyping them is the single most tedious part of getting started, and it is the reason a lot of good assessments stay stuck in a Word file.
Two features shipped this week to fix that from opposite directions: one pulls questions out of documents you already have, the other keeps every question you write so you never start from a blank page again.
Key takeaway
Upload a PDF or Word test and PaperScorer detects the questions and adds them for you to review. Separately, your item bank now collects every question from your managed assessments so you can search it and pull items into a new test. Document import costs nothing — no tokens.
Upload a document, get an assessment
Choose Upload a document when you create an assessment, or when you add questions to an existing one. PaperScorer reads the file and adds what it finds as ordinary editable items.
It detects four question types:
- Multiple choice, including multi-select
- True/false
- Yes/no
- Written response
Numeric, matching, and ordering questions are deliberately skipped rather than forced into a shape that does not fit. If your test has them, everything else still imports and you add those few by hand.
PDFs get the better treatment. The file goes across as a document rather than being flattened to plain text first, so layout survives — two-column tests import correctly, and a bolded or marked correct answer is still recognisable as the key. Word documents are already digital text, so they take the simpler path.
The answer key is transcribed, never guessed
This is the part worth understanding before you trust it with a test.
Correct answers are imported only when your document marks them. If your answer key lives on a separate sheet, or in your head, the questions come in with no key and you fill it in during review.
That is a deliberate choice. A system that guessed at answers would be right most of the time and quietly wrong the rest of the time, and a wrong answer key is the worst possible failure — it produces confident, incorrect grades for a whole class. Transcribing what is on the page and leaving the rest blank is the honest behaviour, even though it means a little more work when your key is somewhere else.
Every extracted question also carries a confidence rating, so anything the extraction was unsure about gets flagged for you rather than buried in a list of thirty items.
Import costs no tokens
Document import does not spend AI generation tokens. Uploading a test is free on every plan, however many questions come out of it. Tokens are only used when you ask PaperScorer to write new questions from a prompt.
Your item bank
The second feature works the other way around. Every question you write in a PaperScorer-managed assessment can now be collected in a personal item bank and reused.
You control how it fills up. Set it to Show all my questions and everything you write lands there automatically, or Only questions I save to it if you would rather curate. When you are building a new test, choose Add from item bank and pull items straight in.
Once you have a few hundred items, finding the right one matters more than storing it, so the bank supports:
- Free-text search across your questions
- Filtering by standard
- Filtering by tag
- Including, excluding, or showing only archived questions
Questions keep their standards and tags when you reuse them, so a question written for one unit still reports correctly when it appears on a later test.
The item bank covers assessments where PaperScorer manages the question content. If you are scanning against a test where we only hold the answer key, there is no question text for the bank to store.
Four ways to build a test now
Between this week's work and the last few releases, there are now four ways to get questions into an assessment, and only one of them involves typing:
- Upload a document — a PDF or Word test you already wrote
- Import from your LMS — a Canvas quiz, with its answer options and point values
- Generate with AI — describe the test and get draft questions, one token each
- Pull from your item bank — reuse what you have already written
They combine. Import an old midterm, top it up with a few generated questions, pull two items from last year's unit test, and print the result — all in one assessment.
Also shipped this week
A few smaller changes worth knowing about:
- The answer sheet print modal can now include the answer key, so you are not hunting for it separately at grading time.
- A new per-student review screen lets you go over results with one student on your screen without exposing anyone else's grades.
- Point values can be updated in bulk rather than one question at a time.
- The class sync screens for external LMS imports got a clearer layout.
Start with a test you already wrote
Create a free account, upload a PDF or Word test, and see what comes back. 100 scans included, no credit card, and document import costs no tokens.
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