From Worksheet PDF to Gradeable Assignment in Under Five Minutes

Most ESL teachers don't start from a blank page. They start from a folder — sometimes a physical one, sometimes a scattered mess of Google Drive and old email attachments — full of worksheets built up over years of teaching: a grammar quiz photocopied so many times the corners are soft, a reading-and-questions sheet from a coursebook supplement, a writing prompt handout that's worked well for three cohorts running. None of it is usable in an online tool as-is. Retyping a 15-question quiz by hand, one multiple-choice option at a time, is exactly the kind of task that makes "just use paper again this term" feel like the faster option.

That's the actual friction the Import from PDF or Image card on the New Assignment page is built to remove: upload the worksheet you already have, and AI turns it into a structured task you can review, edit, and assign.

What the import actually does

Upload a PDF, PNG, or JPG, and the AI looks at what's in it and makes one decision: does this look like a quiz, or does it look like a writing prompt?

If it finds question-and-answer content — numbered items, multiple-choice options, fill-in-the-blank lines, true/false statements — it comes back as a quiz task, pre-filled with the extracted questions in the supported types. If it finds an essay-style prompt instead, it comes back as a writing task with the prompt text ready to use. Either way, the result lands directly in the assignment you're building, alongside a CEFR level and a cap on how many questions to pull if it's a quiz (up to 30).

There's one detail worth knowing before you rely on this for an existing test: if the file already looks like a properly structured, ready-to-use test — clear numbering, defined sections, options already written out — the import preserves the original questions rather than rewriting or re-leveling them. You're not fighting the AI to keep a test you've already refined; a worksheet that's already correct comes back correct.

Where this saves real time

The clearest win is exactly the scenario above: a quiz or test you've already written, sitting as a PDF or a scan, that just needs to exist as a gradeable task instead of a stack of paper. Upload it, set the CEFR level, and in under a minute you have the same test as an online assignment — no retyping 20 multiple-choice questions and their four options each.

Simple writing prompts convert just as cleanly. A one-paragraph handout asking students to write about a topic doesn't need much interpretation; the AI extracts the intent and produces a usable prompt at your target level.

Where it's honestly not the right tool

The whole-assignment import card only ever produces one of two things: a quiz, or a writing task. If what you actually have is a gapped-text cloze passage, a matching exercise, or a word/sentence transformation drill, this card isn't the path — those task types have their own generators inside the assignment builder, and those generators handle an uploaded file differently. They don't extract your existing gaps or matching pairs as-is; they use the document as source material and write a new passage or pair set around it, at your chosen CEFR level.

That distinction matters if you already have a matching exercise you're happy with, gaps placed exactly where you want them. In that case, AI reinterpreting the source material into a new version isn't actually faster than opening the task and retyping the pairs yourself — sometimes it's slower, because now you're checking a rewritten version against the original instead of just typing what you already know is correct. The import card is for turning paper into digital, not for reformatting an exercise you've already perfected.

The honest limits, and why the review step still matters

Two things are worth knowing before you upload anything from a real classroom.

First, nothing gets saved. The file itself is processed in memory to generate the task and isn't stored anywhere afterward — useful to know if you're uploading something with a student's name still on it from a prior use, though it's worth stripping identifying details before upload regardless.

Second, this drafts — it doesn't finalize. The same principle applies here as it does everywhere else AI touches this platform: the imported quiz or prompt appears in the task list for you to check before anything goes near a student, the same way an AI-suggested grade stays a suggestion until a teacher reviews it. Multiple-choice options get sanity-checked and normalized automatically, but "the AI inferred the correct answer" isn't the same as "the correct answer is definitely right" — especially on a scan where the AI had to read handwriting or a slightly blurry photo. Review the extracted content the same way you'd proofread anything you didn't type yourself.

The CEFR level you set before importing isn't just a label, either. It's what the AI uses to decide how to phrase a writing prompt or how much to trust a quiz's difficulty against your class — worth double-checking against how you'd set that level on a rubric if the source worksheet was written for a different level than the one you're teaching this term.

What this looks like in practice

Open New Assignment, and the Import from PDF or Image card sits at the top of the page, above the task builders for writing, quiz, gapped text, matching, and transformation. Choose your file, set the CEFR level, set a question cap if it's a quiz, and click Import. The converted task appends to whatever assignment you're building — it doesn't create a separate file or test on its own, so you can still add a due date, grading scale, and recipients the normal way, and mix the imported task with freshly generated ones if you want a blended assignment.

This is one piece of a larger idea behind the assignment-building side of Writing, no kidding: levelled prompts, quizzes, and reusable templates generated in seconds instead of rebuilt from scratch each term. Importing an existing worksheet is just the version of that where the starting material already exists on your hard drive instead of in your head.

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