Intelligrade – EU Based Digital Exams

Hey HN!

I am Kevin and together with my co-founder Steven I have built Intelligrade over the last 2 years. Steven is a teacher and he got sick of having to deal with outdated, overly expensive and inadequate tooling to create, conduct and grade exams. Most of them don't respect privacy either or are US based which generally disqualifies them from usage in many parts of the EU.

So we set out with a mission: Create a tool for teachers and schools that covers exams E2E. The reality is that teachers usually care about some things that we simply could not find combined in a product: They want flexible ways to create exams with different task types, they want auto-grading where possible, they want to collect parent signatures, they want to be privacy conscious and they care that their students don't cheat.

We got to work and this is our result. We tried to address all of these points and more and after two years of development and a multi month beta in stealth mode with a bunch of teachers from Stevens school we are confident enough to officially launch.

For those who are more interested in the technical aspects I thought I would share some of them: We use Nextjs as our meta framework, Sqlite for data persistence, Drizzle as our ORM and Litestream for backups. On the frontend we make extensive use of the different Tanstack libraries, Tiptap for various rich text modules and a heavily modded shadcn component library for large parts of the UI.

I will mention that the Spanish translations we use are AI generated and we are fleshing it out more as we get feedback from some of our testers. So are the cover images for our blog posts. We hope to replace them once we have some more time to flesh out our CI.

We are a small start up: Just 2 people and fully self-funded. This is a passion project of ours which we hope will help teachers in their workflows and we hope to turn this into our full time jobs if we can make this thing grow. We are super happy to hear your feedback! Feel free to ask questions, I will be around to answer them.