GradeWiz, an artificial-intelligence teaching assistant founded by Cornell undergraduates Max Bohun ’25 and Aman Garg ’25, has been accepted into startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 Batch.

Credit: Provided

GradeWiz uses AI and computer vision to grade homework and exams, giving educators more time, the founders say, to devote to teaching. 

The team is now working with educators at Cornell, California Polytechnic State University, Hunter College, Pennsylvania State University and Syracuse University to pilot their grading technology.

For more than two years, Bohun and Garg developed GradeWiz, which they say gives students more feedback in less time while maintaining instructor involvement. GradeWiz participated in the 2024 cohort of the eLab student startup accelerator, one of the most competitive years to date.

“The founders of GradeWiz have that rare ability to pursue their product vision while constantly adapting to market needs,” said Ken Rother, managing director of eLab. “We are incredibly gratified that GradeWiz was able to leverage the eLab program to develop both their product and, more importantly, their entrepreneurial skills.”

As students and teaching assistants, Bohun and Garg understood the viewpoints of both students who want more timely grades and professors who are already overloaded with teaching and research obligations. 

“This is a multifaceted problem that affects people in a lot of different ways,” Garg said. “Around the same time, large language models were becoming popular. We thought, maybe we can use this technology to solve the problem.”

Garg said eLab helped the team secure grants in Cornell’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, allowing them to work on GradeWiz full time over the summer. He said eLab also gave them advice on how to push products out fast and handle legal incorporation.

The AI teaching assistant has graded over 30,000 submissions this year and reduced grading time by 60%. Each submission gets detailed next-day feedback.

“Getting my grades back the same day has been amazing,” one Cornell student said. “The feedback was very specific and helpful. It told me exactly what I did wrong and helped me learn more effectively.”

Y Combinator – whose more than 5,000 alumni companies have a collective value of more than $600 billion – has an acceptance rate of less than 2%.  

“They look for people who are obsessively focused on solving a very specific problem,” Garg said, “and they like to make sure those people are very well-positioned to solve the problem.”

Educators interested in early access to the system can join a waitlist.

“We believe in five years no one is going to grade papers manually because we feel all repetitive processes are getting automated,” Garg said, “and people are moving to roles where they can add value with human reasoning – such as teaching.”

Katharine Downey is a marketing communications coordinator for Cornell Research and Innovation.