Fast answers to the questions we hear most from individual instructors.
No. You create student accounts yourself from Roster. ProfDesk generates a Student ID and password for each one, and that single account works across every course you teach. A recovery email is optional, mainly useful if a student wants to link Google SSO for one-click sign-in later.
Yes. Students can create a federated ProfDesk account with form signup or Google and connect multiple teacher-issued class records under My Account. Those classes appear together in My Classes.
No. OBE (CLO/PLO mapping) is an optional tab in Course Settings. Leave it off for a plain grading course with no accreditation overhead. Nothing about grading, rubrics, or ZenGrader depends on it. Turn it on any time; nothing is lost if you turn it off again later.
The PLO Setup Wizard ships with presets for Engineering (Washington Accord / PEC / NBA 11-attribute and 12-PLO Classic variants, and ABET EAC), Computing (ABET CAC / Seoul Accord), Medicine (CanMEDS roles), Nursing (AACN Essentials), Business (AACSB goals), a Generic Bloom-based set for any field, or you can start blank and define your own. An AI recommender can also suggest the best-fit framework from your course title, field, and description.
AI grading (Auto-Grade with AI / AI Grade All) proposes rubric-based scores for your review, and never finalizes or publishes a grade on its own. Every AI-suggested score lands in the same editable rubric panel a manual grade would, so you review, adjust, and approve before saving. Treat it as a fast first pass, not a final verdict; you retain full academic responsibility for every published grade.
Relevant excerpts (submission content, assignment instructions, rubric details) are sent to our third-party AI provider to process your request, per our Terms. When an instructor deletes a connected roster entry, course, or account, instructor-owned content is deleted while the federated student retains only their own work and grading results in read-only Academic Records. Unconnected class records are deleted. If the federated account is deleted, those detached records are deleted and any still-live connected class records return to the instructor.
Free lets you create as many courses as you like with up to 2 active at a time, 15 active students per course (your roster itself is unlimited), 500 MB storage, and 20 AI credits a month, with bulk AI grading and similarity detection drawing from that same monthly pool. Free also AI-matches 10 scanned papers a month to your roster; beyond that you add papers yourself with Submit on Behalf, which has no monthly limit on any plan. Attendance can be marked by hand or by AI scan of your paper register on either plan; live student self-check-in is Pro. Analytics are included on Free as a working sample: your most at-risk student and your weakest learning outcome in full, with the class-wide counts alongside them. ProfDesk Pro removes the per-course student limit, keeps every course active, raises storage to 10 GB, provides 500 AI credits per month under fair use, removes the AI-matching cap, and unlocks live check-in sessions, course sequencing, question-bank reuse, one co-instructor place and the full analytics set (every at-risk student, the complete CLO and PLO attainment matrix, and CSV export). See the Pricing page for current price and any current offer. Free plan limits are subject to change based on available resources.
Yes, that's a fully supported way to use ProfDesk. Assessments, questions, rubrics, ZenGrader, AI grading, gradebook, attendance, and messaging all work with the Outcomes (OBE) tab switched off.
Student and instructor submissions are handled as PDF files in ZenGrader (scanned handwriting, typed documents exported to PDF, or code printed/converted to PDF all work the same way). For on-paper work, you bring the scan in yourself via AI Student Matching or Submit on Behalf.
Upload up to 30 scanned PDF submissions at once. The AI reads the roll number (or name) written on each PDF and matches it to the corresponding enrolled student on your course roster, so you don't have to manually sort a stack of scans. Files it can't confidently match are listed separately for you to handle by hand. Free AI-matches 10 papers a month and Pro is unlimited. If you have more papers than that, add the rest from ZenGrader with Submit on Behalf, which has no monthly limit on any plan. Re-importing a corrected scan of a paper you already brought in does not use another one.
No. Each student only ever sees their own grades (once you release them) and their own submissions. Instructors see the full class; students see only themselves.
Individual instructors. You sign up yourself, manage your own courses and students, and there's no institutional admin, IT rollout, or per-seat licensing to negotiate, and it's meant to be usable and affordable the same day you decide to try it.
Yes, on ProfDesk Pro. You can invite one colleague by email as a co-instructor of a course, from Course Settings, General tab. Inside that course they can grade, build and publish learning modules, edit assessments, upload course files, see the full roster and grant extensions, all recorded under their own name. The course stays yours: its storage, AI credits and billing remain on your account, and enrolling students, messaging, exporting, re-teaching and deleting stay with you alone. The Co-Instructors guide in these docs covers the full list.
ProfDesk Pro includes 1 co-instructor place. A place is one colleague on one course, counted across every course you own, so the same colleague on a second course uses a second place. Removing a co-instructor frees the place immediately. An add-on for additional co-instructor places is coming soon.
Your 2 oldest active courses stay fully unlocked and editable; any additional courses become Locked (Read-Only): viewable by you and your students, but not editable, with AI disabled on them, until you either upgrade again or replace one of your 2 active courses (with 30 days between replacements). If a course has a co-instructor, they drop to read-only rather than losing the course, and full access returns the moment you upgrade again, with no new invitation.
Yes. The Courses page offers an optional demo course with its own small, separate lifetime AI trial allowance. Add it when you want to try Generate with AI, Auto-Grade with AI, and the CLO AI Assistant without using your regular monthly quota.
You can import a zip of scanned submissions exported from Canvas and ProfDesk will match files to students by filename (roll number or name). For loose scans that aren't already organized by filename, use AI Student Matching instead, which reads each PDF directly.
You can build online quizzes with multiple choice, multiple answer, true/false, short answer, essays, and matching questions. Objective questions are auto-graded upon submission, while essays and short answers route to your review queue with optional AI grading assist. See the <a href="docs/quizzes">Quizzes & Question Banks guide</a>.
Yes. On the quiz Results dashboard, click Grant Extra Attempt next to that student's name. This gives them one additional attempt without changing the limit for the rest of the class.
Yes. Students can create unlimited private practice quizzes in the Student Workspace for revision. These are always ungraded, allow unlimited attempts, and display instant feedback and explanations.
Email [email protected] any time. ProfDesk is an individually operated product, so support comes directly from the team building it, not a ticket queue.
