PaperRater Review:
based on real mystery shopping

A*Help Score: 47/100
🔥 published June 26, 2024 - updated June 26, 2024

Quick Overview

PaperRater is an affordable tool for checking papers, emphasizing grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and writing clarity, with additional plagiarism checks. It offers free and subscription-based plans, but only evaluates readability and lacks detailed content analysis. While quick with evaluations, the grading quality needs to be improved; some errors are missing, and there is a lack of punctuation improvements. After a thorough PaperRater review, the service received a 47/100 A*Help score.

The Good
  • Easy-to-use platform
  • Can be used for free
  • Convenient grading form
The Bad
  • Grades only writing quality
  • Can’t download the graded paper

When you write essays and research papers as a part of your homework, you can only guess which grade it will receive. Even if you know how your professor evaluates written works, you can’t really objectively assess your own assignment.

Some services can help you though. If you search online, you will find a bunch of essay checkers and paper graders offering to analyze and grade your work. PaperGrader is one of these tools. This platform mostly provides proofreading services, assisting writers with spotting and correcting grammar and spelling mistakes. Aside from that, it also promises to grade your work. Having found out about that, we just couldn’t stop thinking: can it actually help students and teachers with assessing essays? Our team hopes that our review will give a clear answer to this question.

PaperRater Review: Mystery Shopping Experience

Grading papers is a responsible task that needs close attention. Therefore, we wouldn’t want you to use just any essay-checking service that you find online. After all, grading systems can vary and results provided by such platforms won’t fully reflect the score of your papers. Still, some of the tools can give you a good idea of what you missed in your writing. And to find such helpful platforms we organized a special mystery shopping experiment.

The main focus of our testing process was the assessment of the grading quality. To do that, we took two different essays. The first one was badly written, had poor structure, illogical connection between paragraphs and sentences, improper citations, no transition words, no conclusion, and punctuation and spelling errors. The other paper was a well-written and structured essay, organized according to all academic standards. 

We submitted both texts to see whether the platform would give us relevant and proper feedback on the papers’ topic coverage, writing quality, cohesiveness, and structure. After that, we would compare the provided grading to the actual results and evaluate the overall Grading Quality of the platform.

During our mystery shopping, we also paid attention to the criteria which the service offered to grade, as well as the flexibility of the grading form, and pricing policies. All of these features helped us evaluate the value-for-money aspect of the platform. Additionally, we also took notice of the overall user experience from using the service: whether it was convenient to register and fill out the grading form, whether there were any tool-integration possibilities, and whether we could upload and download files on the website. 

We have worked with PaperRater and evaluated it across all three aspects. You can see the detailed results of this process in our Paperrater com review below.

Checking out PaperRater
Checking out PaperRater (click to see a bigger image)

PaperRater: Grading Quality –  17/60 ⭐️

PaperRater was quick with the evaluation of both our papers. It didn’t show such a great report that we would have hoped for. First of all, the tool doesn’t take into account the structure of writing when checking, as it can only note the use of transition words. It also won’t help you make your arguments or the general content of your work any stronger.

However, it does give a breakdown of the quality of style, spelling, grammar, vocabulary, plagiarism, and the use of vocabulary words. Each of these aspects was graded separately and included an extra note on what might need to be improved and how it can be done. We would like to also make a side note here to highlight the fact that even though the service specializes in improving grammar, it can skip some errors. In our case, when checking the poorly-written essay, only 3/4 spelling and 2 grammar mistakes were corrected, but no punctuation was improved. In the second essay, on the other hand, Paper Rater did find a few mistakes that weren’t there but overall showed that the text had a good grammar score.

At the end of this analysis, the bad essay was labeled with a score of 70/100 (C), and the good paper received a 96 (A) grade. Prompts to PaperGrader, as this tool shows a warning that the provided grades are not complete, as they only analyze the aspects that are shown in the report. Considering all the facts though, we can’t say that this service has a sufficient grading quality.

👍Well-Written Essay👎Poorly-Written Essay
96 (A)Given Grade70(C)
OkayGeneral feedback
with strong/weak points
Okay
Doesn’t checkEssay structureDoesn’t check
Doesn’t checkTopic focusDoesn’t check
FineCohesivenessFine
FineSpelling & GrammarOkay
Doesn’t checkCitationsDoesn’t check

PaperRater: Value for Money — 17/20⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We think that checking the features provided by the service is important. After all, this can give you a clear sense of whether the chosen platform will cover your needs and give you the grade you are looking for. So, we snooped around PaperRater to see what it offers, and here’s what we found.

When working on the website, we noted that the service puts a great emphasis on checking papers’ grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and writing clarity, and can even provide plagiarism checks. Moreover, a paid plan would also give us the option to see the readability score of the writing. As to the actual content of the writing, however, the platform doesn’t assess anything but readability. Its grading form also didn’t give us much opportunity to specify the topic of our paper or the subject we were writing for. We could only choose the study level for our assignment and the type of work it was. 

PaperRater pricing plans
PaperRater pricing plans (click to see a bigger image)

What we can say about PaperRater though is that, considering it doesn’t really have much to offer, it is reasonably priced. The monthly subscription comes just at $14.99/month. For those who are planning on a long-term commitment to the service, there’s an even more attractive yearly option for $95.40. However, we would recommend benefiting from the service’s free plan. It comes with some minor limitations, such as a one-time submission cap being 5 pages and an overall monthly limit of 50 submissions. Yet, as we tried working on the platform for free, we would say that this could be more than enough.
In general, we would say that PaperRater has a couple of valuable features, but it doesn’t offer that much to its users.

5/5
Pricing & Subscriptions
10/12
Grading Aspects
2/3
Grading Platform

Paper Rater: Overall Experience — 13/20⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you choose to work with an online service, it is important to make sure that it is convenient to use. To be honest, the website was pretty simplistic, with the interface looking like it came back from 2010. Yet, it was usable. A great plus was that we didn’t have to register with PaperRater to use its tools – we just started working with it right away. 

The grading form was straightforward: we could upload a document or paste a text and then specify the type of writing and study level. The results were presented clearly, in a special box with a detailed description of each of the graded criteria. Aside from that, it also included information on the total number of sentences, average sentence length, and sentence variation. However, it should be clarified that although PaperRater provides an option to get a printable report, it doesn’t give any means to actually download it. Additionally, there’re no options to sign in with a Google or Apple account, and while the tool is simple and easy to use, the website feels a bit clumped. 

Overall, we can say that our experience working with the service was okay, but there’s a lot of room for improvement.

11.5/15
Website Experience
1.5/3
Support
0/2
Accessibility

Conclusion

Our verdict is as follows: PaperRater is not the best service to use if you want to get a grade for your paper. This service can certainly help to understand where your writing needs to be more cohesive and whether you need to improve your vocabulary. It can also be helpful if you need to quickly make sure you haven’t missed any grammatical mistakes. Unfortunately, though, you can’t expect to get a relevant score from this platform, as it doesn’t analyze the content and structure of your writing. And the A*Help score of just 47/100 pts supports this statement.  

FAQ

Is PaperRater safe?

Yes, we have worked with PaperRater and can confirm that this service is safe to use. It has all the necessary security measures in place including a safe payment process. Moreover, the service doesn’t require any registration, so even information about your email won’t be stored by the website without you knowing.

Is PaperRater legit?

Yes, PaperRater is a legitimate website that provides essay editing services. AHelp tested it out and can confirm that here you can get your writing checked as promised by the platform.

How does PaperRater work?

To work with PaperRater, you just need to either copy-paste or upload your text into the special field on the platform. After that, the service will check your paper and give you an approximate grade specifically for your writing (its clarity, grammatical correctness, and cohesiveness).

PaperRater Specs

> Pricing & Subscriptions
Free plan/trial
5 pages/submission
50 submission /month
10 plagiarism check/month
grammar & spelling checks
writing suggestions
automated scoring
Monthly subscription
$14.95/mo
Annual subscription
$95.40/yr
> What is graded by the service
Readability
Clarity
Logic
Vocabulary
Spelling, Punctuation, Grammar
Grammar & Spelling
Other 
provides plagiarism report
> Grading Platform
Can specify study level/grade/subject
Study level
type of submitted paper
> Website experience
Easy to navigate
Advertisements on the page
Registration (Can use Google, Facebook, other accounts to register)
Not needed
Convenient grading form
However, poor design
Shows word count/reading time/ characters
wordcount
total sentence
average sentence length
sentence variation
Ability to make changes on the platform
Fix grammar, spelling
Can upload/download graded papers
> Support
On-site chat/Help center
FAQ section
Blog/Guides
Grammar and writing help
+ a list of commonly confused words
> Accessibility
Desktop app
Extension to browsers
Why academichelp.net is a credible source of information:

Stay curious with us. Academichelp.net has been a reliable educational resource since 2011, providing students with the latest news, assignment samples, and other valuable materials. Even with the extensive information we process, our quality remains consistent. Each team member has experience in education, allowing us to evaluate new sector offerings critically. Our reviews are up-to-date and relevant, with impartiality ensured by the A*Help score methodology from mystery shopping. We aren’t affiliated with any listed service providers. Our focus remains on providing our audience with reliable and unbiased data.

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