A teaching assistant for law faculty
Drafts the work. Keeps you in charge.
Socrates helps law professors create formative assessments and grading rubrics grounded in their own course materials. It does the heavy lifting; you review, edit, and decide what your students ever see — and your materials are never used to train any AI model.
Why formative assessment
When did you last teach a student who didn't want more feedback?
Every best-practice guide says the same thing: students learn most from frequent, low-stakes formative assessment. The trouble has always been the work behind it.
Good multiple-choice questions are genuinely hard to write well. Essays and short answers are slow to assess, and giving each student detailed, individual feedback is harder still — so most of us give far less of it than we'd like to.
Socrates is built to close that gap. It drafts the questions, rubrics, and feedback; you stay the editor. The result is more formative assessment, more often, without the hours it usually costs.
What you can do
Built for the parts of teaching that are hardest to do well — and hardest to do often.
Feedback as often as teaching needs
Give every student detailed, consistent feedback on short-answer and essay work — every week, not just at the midterm. As much practice as your students want, as often as you want to give it, at a volume that simply isn't possible by hand.
Formative assessments
Generate multiple-choice (including NextGen-style), short-answer, and essay questions from your own materials — then review and edit every one before any student sees it.
Rubric creator
Turn an exam you have already written into a clear, point-allocated draft rubric. Edit the criteria and the scoring, and norm it against real student answers.
Your tool, your authorship
You review, edit, and own everything Socrates drafts — it becomes your work product. Drop the questions into your slides or a handout, the same way nobody cites the test bank behind a quiz.
How it works
Begin with a single topic — and stay in control the whole way.
Most faculty start with formative assessments, a safe and specific place to begin. The rubric creator and written-feedback tools follow naturally from there.
Start with one topic
Pick a case or doctrine and generate a few questions. You could run your first assessment in the second week of class.
Review and shape it
Every question and rubric is a draft you edit, accept, or discard. You decide what — if anything — reaches your students.
Grow as you go
As you get comfortable, add short-answer and essay feedback, build a library of your materials, and request fuller features.
Where we stand
You stay the author
Socrates drafts; you review, edit, and approve. Nothing reaches a student unless you decide it should.
Your IP stays yours
Any intellectual property that pre-exists your upload remains with its original authors.
No training on your work
Neither Socrates nor any underlying AI platform trains on the materials you upload.
Who's behind it
Built for legal education, by people who know it.
The single biggest reason faculty trust a tool like this is knowing who made it. A short, concrete note on the team, the law-faculty involvement behind Socrates, and early pilots belongs here.
Questions faculty ask
Frequently asked questions
Whose work product is the output?
Yours. Socrates drafts; you review, edit, accept, or discard — so what reaches your students is your authored work, the same way a quiz you write from a test bank is your own. Nothing is shared unless you choose to share it.
Who owns the materials I upload?
You do. Any intellectual property that exists before you upload it remains entirely with its original authors. Uploading course notes, outlines, slides, or cases does not transfer any rights.
Will my materials be used to train AI models?
No. Socrates does not train — and no underlying AI platform trains — on the materials you upload. They are used only to generate the assessments and rubrics you ask for, for your own use with your own students.
Where does Socrates get its content?
From the materials you give it. Upload a syllabus, outline, notes, slides, or specific cases, and it builds assessments around exactly those. Upload nothing and it draws on general knowledge of the subject and tells you so — your materials are how you guide and constrain it.
What are NextGen questions?
The NextGen Bar Exam (from the NCBE, first administered July 2026) tests law through stand-alone multiple-choice questions and integrated question sets — a shared fact scenario followed by several linked items, both multiple-choice and short constructed responses, that build on one another. Socrates can draft assessments in that integrated NextGen style so your students practice the format before it counts.
Which subjects and topics does NextGen cover?
The NCBE groups the exam into eight Foundational Concepts and Principles — Business Associations, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contract Law (including UCC Article 2 Sales), Criminal Law and Constitutional Protections, Evidence, Real Property, and Torts — assessed together with Foundational Skills such as legal research and writing, issue spotting and analysis, and client counseling. For the authoritative, up-to-date list of subjects, skills, and sample questions, see the NCBE NextGen Bar Exam site at nextgenbarexam.ncbex.org.
Interested?
Request more information
Socrates is offered to law faculty by invitation while we keep access deliberate and gather feedback. If you or your law school would like to learn more, leave your details and we'll be in touch.