Background
Being a PhD student in the States usually implies that besides research, teaching (being a teaching assistant) and grading will also be a major part of your PhD workload.
As of Oct 2025, I am 3rd year PhD student where I’ve had to grade homeworks for various classes all the way from data structures, data analysis and even applied algorithms.
Assignments can range from theoretical questions all the way to implementing them in code. In such scenarios, grading around 10-15 submissions is not an issue, but as the class size grows it significantly starts cutting into your research time and time that could be used to used to do actual research.
Hence, this blog was born out of a necessity to me trying to get back some time for myself.
The autograder mentioned here is for grading code submissions! Questions which have hand written solutions (proofs, and other theory based questions) still need to graded manually.