It's Sunday, it's after ten, and you're the owner, the principal, the person who wrote the worksheet, and the person marking it. The teaching finished on Saturday. This is the part nobody pays for.
The arithmetic
Marking feels like a small job because each sheet is a small job. Multiply it out and it isn't.
Say you have forty students, each doing one set a week, and a set takes you six minutes to mark properly. That's four hours a week. Across a ten-week term it's forty hours, a full working week, spent on the one task a student learns least from, because by the time the sheet comes back marked the question is a week old and they've forgotten what they were thinking.
If you charge by the hour for teaching, put that rate against forty hours and the number is uncomfortable. If you don't, it's still forty hours you didn't spend planning, calling a parent, or being at home on a Sunday.
The marking hours calculator does this with your own students, your own sets and your own minutes. The total tends to be a surprise, because the marking never happens in one block. It happens in half-hours, after everything else, and half-hours don't feel like a week.
What the student gets from it
Not much, and this is the part that makes the forty hours worse rather than just long.
A student does a set on Wednesday. It's collected Tuesday, marked Sunday, handed back the Tuesday after. Two weeks between the attempt and the feedback. The red cross on question 7 arrives so long after the thinking that produced it that there's nothing to connect it to. The student sees a mark, not a mistake. Multiply that by a term and the marking has cost you forty hours and taught the class almost nothing, which is a poor trade in both directions.
The feedback that changes anything arrives while the thinking is still warm. Wrong, here's why, here's the method, try the next one. That's what happens in the room. Between sessions, on paper, it can't happen at all, because the person who'd give it is you and you're not there.
What marks itself
On the platform, most of the marking doesn't exist as a job. It happens the moment the student submits, against the answer key in your material.
| Question type | What happens |
|---|---|
| Multiple choice | Marked instantly against your key |
| Short answer | Marked instantly, with equivalent forms recognised where your key allows |
| Numeric | Marked instantly, units checked where your key specifies them |
| Fill in the gap | Marked instantly |
| Extended response, essay | Assessed against the criteria in your material and shown to the tutor with a suggested mark |
Equivalent forms matter more than they sound. A student who writes 23/20 when the key says 1 3/20 has the right answer, and a system that marks it wrong teaches them something false. Where your key allows it, both score. Where your key says simplest fraction, only simplest fraction does.
Every marked question comes with a worked solution, right then, following the method in your notes. Wrong answers get it so the mistake is corrected while it's warm. Right answers get it too, because a student who got there by luck learns the method and a student who got there on purpose moves on. The instant marking page walks through what that looks like on a phone.
What still needs a person
Extended responses. An essay, a long-form explanation, a proof, anything where the mark is a judgement rather than a match.
These aren't marked automatically, and shouldn't be. What happens instead is that the response is assessed against the criteria in your material, your rubric, your band descriptors, and goes to the tutor with a suggested mark and the reasons for it. The tutor reads the work, adjusts the mark if it's wrong, adds the feedback the student actually needs, and finalises it.
That's still work. It's the work that was worth doing all along, and it's less of it, because the first read is done and the tutor is starting from a position rather than a blank page. For an English centre with thirty essays on a Sunday, that's the difference between a whole evening and part of one. And a tutor who knows that Priya always rushes her conclusions writes a different comment from one reading her essay cold. That comment is what the parent is paying for.
Any mark, on any question, can be overridden by the tutor with a note the student can see. The final call is always a person who knows the student. The platform gets the mechanical part off your desk and leaves the judgement where it belongs.
What you get back
Not only the hours. The marks feed a grid by topic on the tutor dashboard, so on Monday morning you can see what the class got wrong without having marked anything. They feed the fortnightly parent report, so the parent sees improvement by topic without you writing it up. The forty hours don't just disappear. They turn into two things you were never getting on paper.
This week
Run the arithmetic. Students, sets a week, minutes a set. Multiply it out, then multiply by the weeks in a term, and write the number down. Then list which of your question types are a match against a key and which are a judgement. The first list is what marks itself. The second is what your tutors should be spending their time on.