Using AI for Marking and Feedback Fairly

The one line that does not move

Marking is where the time goes and where the temptation is strongest, so let us fix the boundary before anything else.

A grade that goes on a record is decided by a human who read the work. Not reviewed, not approved, not sanity-checked. Read. If a mark contributes to a report, a set placement, a predicted grade or anything a parent or an exam board will see, a teacher read that piece of work and made that judgement.

Everything else in this lesson lives underneath that line. And there is a lot underneath it, because most of what exhausts you about marking is not the judgement. It is the writing. It is producing the fourteenth version of "your point about the Weimar economy is good, but you need evidence" in language this particular student can act on, at half past nine at night.

Three things that genuinely help

Building a comment bank you actually like. Most comment banks are dreadful because someone wrote them in a hurry in 2016. Generating one from your own criteria, in your own register, gives you a set of phrases to pick from and personalise. You are still choosing which applies to whom.

Spotting patterns across a set. After you have marked, you often have a vague sense that lots of them struggled with something. Turning that into a specific list of what to reteach is a genuinely good use, and it is about the class rather than about individuals.

Rewriting your feedback for different readers. You wrote one comment. You need it at a lower reading age for three students, in more challenging language for two others, and in plainer terms for a parent. That is pure rewriting, and it is exactly what these tools do well.

Build me a formative comment bank from my criteria below.
Subject and task: [ ]
Year group: [ ]
Criteria: [paste yours]
For each criterion, write:

3 comments for work that is strong, each naming what specifically worked
3 comments for work that is nearly there, each with one concrete next step
3 comments for work that has not met it, each with one thing to do first
Rules: address the student as you. Never use the word disappointing.
Every comment must contain an action, not just a description.
Under 30 words each. Leave a square bracket where I should quote
something from the student's own work.
Do not grade or score anything.

The fairness problem nobody mentions

Here is the risk that gets missed. Suppose you use AI to help write feedback on the last eight books, because it is late and you are tired, but the first twenty-two got your own handwritten comments. Now half your class received one kind of feedback and half received another, and the split was decided by your energy levels rather than by anything about the students.

That is not catastrophic, but it is unfair in a way that is easy to avoid: whatever approach you take, take it for the whole set. If AI helped draft feedback for one student, it should be available to all of them. Consistency within a class is the thing you can control, and it matters more than which method you chose.

The same applies across a department. If one teacher uses AI-assisted feedback and another does not, two classes sitting the same assessment get materially different support. Worth a conversation at a department meeting, not a rule you have to solve alone.

Rewriting feedback so it can be read

Feedback a student cannot read does nothing. This is one of the quietest wins available and it takes seconds.

Here is feedback I wrote. Keep the meaning and the actions exactly.
Do not soften the message and do not add praise I did not write.
Produce:

A version for a student who finds reading difficult. Short sentences,
common words, one instruction per sentence.
A version for a confident reader that adds subject vocabulary
without adding length.
A version for a parent that explains what the work shows and what
they could usefully ask their child at home. No jargon.
My feedback:
[paste it]

I have finished marking. Below are my own notes on the errors I saw,
anonymised, one line per student.
Tell me:

The three most common problems, in order
Which of them is a misconception and which is carelessness
For each of the three, one ten minute activity to reteach it
Anything in my notes that suggests I taught something unclearly
Be direct about the last one. I would rather know.
Notes:
[paste them]

What you lose if you hand it over

Marking is not only quality control. It is how you find out what your class actually understands. If a tool reads the work instead of you, you arrive at the next lesson without the thing that would have shaped it. The time saved is real and the information lost is real, and the trade is much worse than it looks at half past nine at night.