Marking Isn’t the Job — Knowing Students Is

Marking isn’t the job

Teaching has always been built on relationships and insight. We do not go through exercise books and scripts for the pleasure of putting ticks on paper. We do it to understand students: what they know, what they do not, what they think they understand, and where things have gone subtly wrong.

Somewhere along the way, marking became mythologised as a badge of dedication. As AI enters the conversation, one fear keeps surfacing: “If I stop marking, will I stop knowing my class?”

The truth is simple: marking itself is not important; knowing your students is. Once we distinguish clearly between marking and feedback, the case for automating marking — and the responsibility to automate it — becomes much clearer.

Marking is just one way to see learning

You can be a brilliant teacher without taking home a stack of books, and a struggling teacher while marking religiously every night. The act of marking is not the skill. The insight that flows from it is.

Teachers already gather insight through many routes.

• Live questioning and mini whiteboards.
• Hinge questions and quick checks.
• Student discussion, peer and self‑assessment.
• Quizzes, cold calling, exit tickets.
• Exam and test marking.

The real risk of automation

There is a genuine risk in automating marking. When we mark manually, we do not just produce scores; we build a mental map of the class.

• Trends and patterns in understanding.
• Clusters of misconceptions and surprising successes.
• Individual quirks and common errors.
• The gap between intention and execution.
• Places where the curriculum has not yet landed.

The Respond approach: replace labour, preserve insight

Respond does replace marking — completely and unapologetically. But it is designed around a central principle: teachers still need to know their students deeply, and that knowing is the real purpose of assessment.

What Respond automates is the labour of marking. What it preserves, structures, and elevates is the insight.

• Class‑level summaries and misconception analysis.
• Question‑by‑question and marking‑point‑level breakdowns.
• Exemplar responses with reasoning that can be shared and discussed.
• Individual student deep dives and strengths‑and‑weaknesses profiles.
• Trend identification across the whole cohort.

The critical question: do we still know our students?

Once insight is preserved, the hours of labour become optional. At that point the question changes from “Should we automate marking?” to “Do we still know our students well enough to teach them well?”

This is similar to the shift in medicine. Doctors do not manually count every pulse anymore. Machines measure continuously, more accurately and consistently, with clear trends and alerts, so that doctors can focus on diagnosis, interpretation, and care.

Manual measurement is no longer a badge of dedication; it is a poor use of time. The same is becoming true of manual marking when better tools exist.

How much insight would you give up for hours saved?

Teachers already make compromises because time is finite. We skim, sample, and prioritise. We accept imperfect insight in exchange for survivability.

Respond asks a better question: what if you could save three to five hours and lose almost none of the insight you would have gained by hand?

• Automation never gets tired or inconsistent.
• It does not forget to write something down.
• It can surface patterns across a whole cohort instantly.
• It highlights misconceptions with statistical clarity.
• It gives teachers data they would never have time to calculate manually.

The payoff: more presence, better feedback, stronger learning

The real outcome of automating marking is not simply hours saved; it is the quality of what replaces those hours.

• Teachers gain: time, deeper visibility into understanding, clearer misconceptions, richer patterns, and more energy for planning, conversation, and relational work.
• Students gain: faster, more precise feedback, better‑planned feedback lessons, stronger interventions, and more teacher attention.

The point was never marking

Marking is not the job. Knowing your students is the job.

Marking has been one of our tools for building that knowledge. Respond offers a better one — one that preserves understanding, gives teachers back their time, and strengthens the feedback processes at the heart of great teaching.

AI will not replace teachers. But it absolutely should replace the parts of teaching that keep teachers away from their students. Respond exists to make that possible.