Eugène de Rastignac is the character most students choose when they write about Père Goriot, which means a single class can produce thirty essays circling the same young man from Angoulême. Many of those papers make similar points about ambition and corruption, and the differences between a strong essay and a middling one can be subtle. That sameness is exactly what makes grading tiring and uneven. AI-assisted grading can help you hold the line on consistency across a large set of near-identical topics.

A good Rastignac essay tracks change over time. The student should show how he arrives in Paris as a law student with modest means and a family counting on him, then moves toward calculation under the influence of Vautrin and Madame de Beauséant. Weak essays describe Rastignac as ambitious on page one and ambitious on page three hundred. Your rubric should reward evidence of movement, with specific scenes marking each turn.

Before grading, decide what counts as a turning point and tell students in advance. Candidates include his first visit to the Restaud household, his conversation with Vautrin about the ladder of success, and his decision to care for Goriot at the end. If you name these moments in the assignment sheet, students can build arguments around them. If you leave it open, you need to be ready to credit any well-defended choice.

What the Software Should and Should Not Decide

AI is good at checking whether an essay meets observable criteria. It can flag a missing thesis, notice when a paragraph makes a claim without any supporting scene, and compare the depth of analysis against the descriptors you wrote. It is less reliable as the final voice on whether a surprising interpretation is brilliant or off the rails. That second call belongs to you, and any tool worth using makes it easy to override a score.

• Whether the thesis claims something about how Rastignac changes, not only who he is
• Whether at least two scenes are used as evidence of change
• Whether the essay addresses the influence of Vautrin and the Parisian salons
• Whether the student distinguishes ambition from moral compromise
• Whether the conclusion says what Rastignac's path suggests about the society around him

Feedback That Pushes Past Character Description

Students often write that Rastignac is "greedy" or "naive," then collect quotes that seem to fit the label. Useful feedback asks them to complicate the label. You might comment that his sympathy for Goriot sits uneasily beside his social climbing, and ask how the essay accounts for both. That one question can lift a paper from a trait list to a real argument.

Generated feedback can draft that kind of comment quickly, but treat it as a first pass. Read each suggestion against the essay in front of you and trim anything that sounds generic. A comment that could be pasted onto any novel essay is not doing its job. The most useful remarks mention a specific scene or sentence the student wrote.

Keeping Scores Fair Across Similar Essays

When thirty papers share a topic, the risk is anchoring. The first strong essay sets your standard, and later papers get measured against it rather than against the rubric. Consistent criteria applied to every paper in the same order helps, and so does shuffling the stack halfway through. Blind scoring, where you grade before looking at names, also reduces the pull of what you already believe about each student.

After scoring, scan the distribution. If nearly every essay landed at the same level, your rubric may not be separating strong analysis from adequate analysis. If scores cluster by class period or by the day you graded, something other than the writing is influencing results. Adjusting the rubric afterward is fine as long as you apply the change to every paper.