How to mark a class of essays faster (without lowering the bar)

A class set of essays is slow to mark for one reason: the first read is slow. You're holding the rubric in your head, finding the evidence, deciding the level, and writing the comment — thirty times, from cold. The marking itself, the judgement, is the fast part. It's the mechanical first pass that eats the evening.

Marking becomes reviewing

The shift that saves the time is to separate the two. Instead of marking thirty essays from scratch, you review thirty first passes — each already read against your rubric, with a score per criterion and the exact lines that earned it. Your attention goes where it should: the borderline calls, the essays that surprise you, the marks you want to move. The routine reads are done.

You stay the marker of record

The point isn't to hand marking to a machine — it's to arrive at the judgement faster with the evidence already in front of you. A good first-pass tool never sets the standard (your rubric does that) and never has the final say (you confirm or change every mark). What it buys you is consistency: every essay in the class read the same way against the same criteria, so the marks hang together before you even start reviewing.

Whatever you teach

This works for any rubric-marked writing — see how it plays out for IB, A-Level, GCSE, AP and university marking. The promise is the same across all of them: keep your standard, give your evenings back.