A guide to No More Marking for parents

If you're a parent and your child's school is using No More Marking, you may find the following information helpful.

About No More Marking

We are an education assessment company that has worked with schools, trusts, and educational organisations in the UK, USA, Australia, and New Zealand for more than ten years. Over that time, we have:

• Helped schools assess millions of pieces of student work.
• Pioneered the use of Comparative Judgement to assess extended writing.

Today, our services are used by around 2,500 schools worldwide. Our assessments are designed to help schools understand student performance, provide meaningful feedback, and support learning.

What is Comparative Judgement?

We have pioneered the use of Comparative Judgement as a method of assessing open-ended tasks like extended writing.

• How it works: Rather than marking work against a checklist, Comparative Judgement involves comparing two pieces of work and deciding which is better. By combining many of these comparisons, it is possible to build a highly reliable picture of a student's performance.
• The research: The method is based on psychometric research dating back to the 1920s. We did not invent Comparative Judgement, but we developed the software that allows it to be used efficiently and at scale.
• Validation: Comparative Judgement has been independently researched and evaluated (including by Ofqual) and is used by educational organisations around the world. We have also published peer-reviewed research explaining our approach and findings.

How Do You Use AI?

For many years, our Comparative Judgement assessments relied entirely on human judgement, successfully assessing approximately 3 million pieces of writing. Since 2025, we have added AI judges as an option and have assessed approximately 500,000 pieces of writing using a blend of human and AI assessment.

Adding AI to the process allows us to speed up assessment, provide feedback more quickly, and reduce workload, while strictly maintaining human oversight.

Our Recommended Approach:

We recommend a mix of 90% AI judgement and 10% human judgement.

Did you know? This particular mix means that every piece of writing will be seen twice by a human. This is actually more than with traditional no-tech marking, where most pieces of writing are typically seen once by one human.

We realise this may sound surprising, so please read our explanation page here which walks through the exact process of human and AI Comparative Judgement.

How Accurate is the AI?

The fact that AI and human judges reach similar conclusions so consistently suggests they are evaluating similar qualities in students' work. Our research shows:

• 80–85% Agreement: The AI agrees with human judges about 80-85% of the time, which is the exact same as human-to-human agreement.
• 15–20% Minor Disagreement: Of the disagreements, most are very small.
• < 0.3% Major Disagreement: Big disagreements are incredibly rare (often as low as just 0.2 - 0.3% of all judgements). The majority of these are the result of straightforward human errors, such as a teacher accidentally clicking the wrong button.

Safeguards & Support

What happens if there is a concern about an assessment result?

Schools can review any assessment result they believe may be inaccurate. If a school has concerns about a particular outcome, it is possible to remove the AI judgements entirely and re-assess the work using human judgements only. In practice, this is very uncommon, but the process exists to provide an additional safeguard and reassurance.

What if the AI makes a mistake?

Maintaining a human element within every assessment provides an important safeguard and makes it easy to continuously monitor the performance of the AI. If any unexpected issues were to arise, they would be detected quickly through comparison with the human judgements.

What Feedback Do Students Receive?

We provide schools with two main feedback options to speed up the process while retaining quality:

1. Audio Feedback: Teachers record verbal feedback, which the AI then transcribes and polishes. This retains teacher engagement with the student's writing while saving time.
2. Direct AI Feedback: Feedback is automatically generated by the AI with no input from teachers. The great advantage here is speed; many schools and students welcome the ability to get detailed written feedback almost instantly.

Data Protection

How do you protect pupil data?

We process personal data strictly in accordance with UK data protection law. Further information about our approach to data protection can be found in our Privacy Policy.

Will my child's writing be used to train AI models?

No. Your child's writing is never used to train AI models. Please see our GDPR guide here for full details.

Updated on: 16/06/2026