AI-enhanced custom tasks: how do I set standards?

If you take part in a national Comparative Judgement assessment, hundreds of other schools and thousands of other students will take part in the same task. This makes it possible for us to standardise the results for you based on the outcomes of all of those students.

However, if you set up a custom task, this isn't possible, as only your students will have done the task.

So what can you do to set the standards? Here are some options.

Option one: use national statistics

If you have a large cohort, and you have some idea of national statistics in this kind of assessment, you could apply those statistics to your students. For example, if you are assessing a large secondary cohort of 150+ students who have all written a GCSE English Language Paper 5 style question, you could award approximately 2.5% a grade 9, as that is the proportion who get a grade 9 nationally. You could also adjust this percentage based on what you know about your school's past performance. This method works well for large cohorts doing assessments that are taken by national cohorts. It is less good for more niche subjects, and not so good for measuring progress.

Option two: use human judgement

You can look at the responses and make a judgement call about where each grade boundary should lie. You can of course use national statistics to help guide this judgement.

Option three: include seed scripts

If you have previous responses to the question which you have agreed are at a certain standard, you can include those in your task and use those to help guide the standard setting. Be careful: it is possible that the seeds do not end up with exactly the same mark in the CJ task as you have determined in advance.

Option four: include anchor scripts

Anchor scripts are responses that are taken from previous CJ assessments. You can pull these through to a new assessment of the same question, and use them to place the new task on the same scale as the old one. This is a more sophisticated approach than using seeds, and allows you to place two tasks on the same scale. It requires you to have a previous CJ task that assessed the same (or similar) question. There is guidance here on how this process works, but we recommend you contact us in advance of setting up such a task.

The logistics of setting standards

• You can choose the minimum and maximum mark range by adjusting the options in the task settings. So, for example, if you want the mark range to go from 0-40, you can set this. If you want to avoid any student getting a 0 or 1, you can set the bottom mark to be 2.
• You can set grade boundaries in the "Boundaries" tab of the "Results & Feedback" section of the task.

Updated on: 05/05/2026