What’s the point of marking?
The chances are, if you’re a teacher, at some point in your career you’ve asked yourself that question — maybe as you carry armloads of exercise books home at the weekend, maybe when you write the same comment for what feels like the hundredth time, maybe when a lesson ends and you see a carefully-marked mock exam paper left behind on someone’s desk.
Marking itself — the act of sitting down with a pen and writing comments on pupils’ work — is pointless, but for students to receive feedback is essential.
Too often, however, the process gets mixed up with the purpose, and schools end up with marking policies more focused on ‘what sort’ and ‘how often’ than ‘why.
Feedback that matters
Good-quality feedback is one of the most effective teaching strategies teachers have in their arsenal, and it can be boiled down to two things:
Feedback to the pupil, to make it clear what they got right, what they got wrong, and what they need to work on next
Feedback for the teacher to tell them what the class understood, what they didn’t, and what needs to be taught next
Lots of schools are realising that writing lengthy comments in coloured pen is an unnecessary time drain which adds to teachers’ already heavy workload, and they are looking for ways to make the process of giving feedback quicker. We’ve seen whole-class feedback, marking menus, verbal feedback, instantly-marked online assessment and comparative judgement all used effectively to save time.
But there’s a missing piece: at some point in their education, pupils need to be able to sit down with a pen and paper and spend at least an hour writing answers, which will be graded. This requires practice, but it’s hard to motivate pupils to want to do so when the odds are no one will have time to check their work beyond a couple of mock exam windows.
What’s more, it (understandably!) takes at least a couple of weeks for teachers to mark a class set of papers, by which time pupils have moved on through the curriculum. They may now understand things they didn’t then, or new misconceptions may have arisen.
That’s where we come in.
More feedback, less work
At Stylus, we’ve combined teacher expertise with the latest technology to design a service offering almost-instant feedback on exam papers or work written by hand. Within a matter of days, pupils can have in their hands not just an UpGrade pack with detailed feedback outlining what they did well and what they need to improve, but also a new paper designed around their individual knowledge gaps and revision needs.
Teachers can access detailed Marker Reports, so they can make sure every lesson is drawing on the most current information about their class’s needs. With all that bonus time and insight, they can focus on the many other things they know work.
Stylus was founded by a teacher who couldn’t mark anymore and believed there must be a better way — it’s taken years to find the solution, but the technology has finally caught up with the vision. If you’d like to see how it works for yourself, you can download sample papers by clicking here.
Alternatively, send us an email — hello@stylus.education — we’d love to talk!
Great idea and best wishes, Hannah. When grading gets complex, teaching r/d/evolves to teaching-to-the-test [TTTT]. LLMs help TTTT reach their maximums, to the point that one might altogether dismiss grading. As to the teaching/learning of grading (i.e. discernments in one's sensing of the world, and consuming and producing in it relevantly) it should return to individual tuition. The classroom is going the way of the dodo now, isn't it? 😀