Marking.ai
Streamlining High School Assessment through AI-Assisted Marking

Jamie Rood, Co-Founder

Assessments must be reviewed carefully, feedback must be meaningful, and consistency across an entire class set must be maintained. Much of this work occurs outside classroom hours, making marking one of the largest hidden workloads in teaching.

Marking.ai was developed to address this challenge by streamlining the marking process while preserving teacher oversight and judgment.

"High school teachers are under constant time pressure, and marking is one of the biggest hidden workloads," says Jamie Rood, co-founder.

Reducing the Administrative Burden of Grading

Teachers often need to deliver more than a score. Feedback must help students understand what to improve and must arrive quickly enough to influence learning rather than weeks later.

Marking.ai helps teachers manage this workload by automating the first pass of the marking process. Educators upload an assessment and student submissions, and the platform produces marks aligned to the marking guide along with clear student feedback and a short justification that teachers can review.

This approach removes much of the repetitive work associated with grading while leaving the final review and judgment with the teacher.

The company's product development approach focuses on understanding how teachers work day to day. Marking.ai maintains a lean team that prioritizes rapid iteration and continuous improvement based on feedback from educators using the platform.

The company notes that building a reliable AI marking system requires far more than simply connecting to a large language model. Developing a process capable of producing dependable outputs involves extensive development and refinement.

This work has become a core focus for the team as it aims to deliver a marking experience that is both efficient and reliable for teachers working under time pressure.

Focusing on Alignment Rather Than Accuracy

During product testing, the team observed that grading can be inherently subjective. Different experienced teachers may assign different marks to the same response, which makes strict definitions of accuracy difficult to apply.

Marking.ai, therefore, focuses on the concept of alignment rather than accuracy. The platform is designed to help individual teachers align AI-generated outputs with their own interpretation of the marking guide.

Teachers can train the system using examples from their previous marking or run workflows inside the platform to adjust results. This allows the system to adapt to each teacher's grading style rather than enforcing a single universal standard.

Supporting Schools and Teachers

The platform has already supported thousands of individual teachers looking to reduce marking workload and provide faster feedback. Early beta users played a significant role in shaping the product through continuous testing and feedback during its development.

Marking.ai is now working with school trusts that manage multiple schools. Collaboration with head offices, head teachers and classroom educators has helped the company understand how assessment processes operate across different levels of a school system.

Through these engagements, the platform has delivered improvements in marking efficiency and the speed at which students receive feedback.

Preparing for Evolving Assessment Models

The company expects the assessment itself to continue evolving. Greater emphasis is likely to be placed on reasoning; evidence based writing, and structured problem solving rather than simple recall.

Marking.ai currently focuses on helping teachers manage marking within the assessment formats schools use today while also building capabilities that support future needs. Ongoing development includes moderation workflows, rubric alignment and tools designed to make feedback more actionable.

By learning from real classroom usage and teacher feedback, Marking.ai aims to improve the reliability and usefulness of AI-assisted marking while keeping teachers in control of how assessments are evaluated.