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Marking.ai Help Centre

Student upload links

Instead of collecting and uploading your students’ work yourself, you can share an upload link with your class. Students click the link, attach their work, and the file lands straight in your assessment, ready to mark.

This article shows you how it works.

  1. Open the assessment you want students to upload to.
  2. Click Student upload link (also available from the assessment card’s menu as Manage upload link). From the Start marking flow, you can instead choose Or share an upload link with your students on the Submissions step.
  3. Pick a Link expiry (see below), then click Create upload link.

The Student upload link dialog shows the generated link with a Copy button, an expiry date, and a live submission count.

Setting the expiry

Links expire automatically. You can pick from the preset periods — 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days — and the picker starts on your default from Settings → Customization. If you need more time after a link is already out there, open the dialog and use Extend by 30 days.

Sharing with your class

Click Copy and share the link wherever your class lives — email, your LMS, a shared doc, or in person. The same link works for every student.

What students see

Students don’t need a Marking.ai account to use the link. On the upload page they:

  1. Enter their full name (this is the only detail the form collects — there’s no email field)
  2. Attach their work as a PDF (up to 20 MB)
  3. Submit

They see a simple confirmation and never see any marks. Their submission appears in your submissions table within seconds.

What happens on your side

As students upload, new submissions appear in your assessment, each tagged with the name the student entered, and marking starts automatically. If two students share a name, you can re-link a submission to the right student afterwards — see Linking a submission to a student.

A link is always in one of three states, shown as a badge in the dialog:

  • Active — accepting submissions
  • Expired — the expiry date has passed; students see a “no longer accepting submissions” page
  • Closed — you closed it manually

From the dialog you can:

  • Extend by 30 days — push the expiry further out
  • Close link — stop accepting uploads immediately (for example, once the deadline has passed). Students with the URL will see a “no longer accepting submissions” page. Submissions already uploaded stay on your assessment.
  • Regenerate — close the current link and mint a brand-new URL. The old URL stops working, so only regenerate if you want to invalidate the link you’ve already shared.

Once a link is expired or closed, the dialog offers a Regenerate link button to create a fresh one.

Default upload settings

Set your default link expiry in Settings → Customization. See Customisation: feedback structure, language, share defaults, currency.

Need help?

Open the Account menu and choose Chat to a human, ask Marko, or email connect@marking.ai.

FAQs

Do my students need an account to upload?

No. The link works for any student you share it with, no sign-in required.

Do students enter their email?

No — the form only asks for their full name. There’s no email field.

What stops random people from uploading?

The link itself is the security mechanism — it’s a long, unguessable URL. Don’t share it publicly, and close the link when the deadline passes.

Close link stops the current link from accepting uploads but keeps its URL on record. Regenerate closes it and issues a new URL — anyone still using the old link is cut off. Use Close when you just want submissions to stop; use Regenerate when you want a fresh link to share.

Can a student upload more than once?

Each student is matched by name, so a repeat submission under the same name is treated as already-submitted. If you do end up with duplicates, you can pick which to keep — see Deleting submissions.