Built where the problem lives.

Fairgrade began with two professors and a frustration every educator recognizes. Sonia and Anthony Marciano — economists who, between them, have taught at NYU Stern, Wharton, Chicago Booth, and Harvard — watched assessment quietly shrink to fit what one grader could carry. Fewer essays. More multiple choice. Less of the thinking college is supposed to teach.

Their answer came from their own discipline: treat grading as an estimation problem. A classroom full of students is a crowd of imperfect instruments — and with the right mathematics, a crowd of imperfect instruments can measure better than any expert alone, provided you learn which instruments to trust. A decade of research later, that mathematics is the Marciano Method: credibility and quality, estimated together, converging on grades a professor can stand behind.

It was tested where it was invented — across 60+ courses and 5,000+ students at NYU Stern. In 2020, Fairgrade won the $100,000 Rennert Prize at NYU’s $300K Entrepreneurs Challenge.

The third co-founder arrived as a student. Yash Goel took the Marcianos’ class during his master’s at NYU Stern and Courant, then brought a product engineer’s career — Senior Product Manager at Walmart US, founder of Flicksys — to the problem of turning a decade of research into an enterprise platform. He is Fairgrade’s President & CTO.

A company about turning students into calibrated evaluators was built by a team that spans both sides of the classroom. We like that symmetry — it means the method worked.