What Makes Teach Edge Different from Other AI Marking Tools

Summary: AI marking can be helpful, but most tools still rely on a copy-paste workflow: paste one script in, get feedback out, paste it back into whatever platform you use. At class scale, the admin around the AI becomes the workload. Teach Edge was built to solve a different problem: a complete assessment and feedback workflow, designed for UK secondary teachers.

AI marking tools: helpful, but often the wrong workflow

AI is increasingly used to support teachers with marking and feedback. Many tools now offer AI-generated comments or indicative marks for individual pieces of student work.

Used carefully, that can be genuinely helpful.

But most "AI marking tools" are still built around a one-script-at-a-time workflow:

• copy a response in
• generate feedback
• copy it back out into Google Classroom, Word, email (or whatever you use day to day)
• repeat for the next student

We built Teach Edge to solve a different problem.

Teach Edge isn't just a marking utility. It's designed as a complete assessment and feedback workflow — from setting a task, to collecting responses, to reviewing feedback, to tracking progress and planning next steps.

What most AI marking tools do

Most tools in this space work like this:

1. A student submits work somewhere else (Google Classroom, Word, email, etc.)
2. The teacher copies and pastes the student response into an AI tool
3. The AI generates draft feedback (sometimes with a suggested mark)
4. The teacher copies that feedback back into the original platform
5. Repeat for the next student

This can work for occasional use. But at class scale, the "admin around the AI" becomes the workload.

The limitation of one-script-at-a-time tools

In real classrooms, marking is only one part of the job. Teachers also need to:

• spot patterns across a class
• track how individuals improve over time
• decide what to reteach, practise, or scaffold next
• ensure feedback is actually read and acted on
• communicate progress clearly to students and parents

Tools that stop at "generate feedback" leave all of that work elsewhere — usually spread across documents, spreadsheets, platforms, and memory.

Teach Edge is built as an assessment workflow, not a standalone tool

Teach Edge is a web-based platform designed to support the entire assessment cycle, not just the act of producing feedback.

AI is used at multiple points in that workflow, but teacher judgement remains central throughout. The goal is simple: reduce time spent moving information around, while improving the quality and usefulness of feedback.

Class-level assignment and feedback, without copy-and-paste workflows

Teach Edge is designed to work at class level from the outset.

A teacher sets a single essay or exam-style question and assigns it to a class (or, where needed, to individual students for targeted intervention). Students submit their work directly through their own portal.

Teach Edge then generates draft marks and feedback for the whole class in one process.

From there, the teacher decides how much to do:

• review quickly and release
• edit specific parts
• adjust marks and feedback where needed

Once the task is set, there is no need to:

• copy and paste student answers into a tool
• copy and paste feedback back into another platform
• manage separate "submission" and "return" systems

It becomes: set once → review as you choose → release.

Designed for exam-realistic questions, responses, and conditions

A lot of AI tools assume short, typed text. Teach Edge is built for real classroom and exam-style work.

Teachers can set questions that include:

• multiple images
• source extracts
• uploaded documents or PDFs

Students can respond with:

• typed answers
• handwritten work uploaded as images
• diagrams and visual working alongside written explanation

Teach Edge also includes Exam Mode, which allows teachers to:

• prevent students from pasting in pre-written text
• record how long students spend on a question

That supports more authentic assessment and helps teachers distinguish between genuine performance and unsupported AI use.

Quick Mark within the wider platform

Teach Edge includes Quick Mark for fast, low-friction marking of individual responses.

Many tools operate entirely at that level.

Quick Mark is useful (many teachers use it frequently), but it's only one part of Teach Edge. The wider platform continues beyond marking into class insights, tracking, structured improvement cycles, and reporting.

What Teach Edge supports beyond marking individual essays

Beyond generating feedback on a single script, Teach Edge supports:

• class-level performance summaries (common strengths and weaknesses)
• individual student progress tracking over time
• scaffolded response planning and differentiation
• teacher-controlled automation levels
• a secure student portal for marks, feedback, and work history
• parent-evening style reports for individual students, generated from assessment data over a teacher-selected time period
• structured second attempts, with the original response and feedback kept alongside the revised version, plus visible changes between attempts
• feedback acknowledgement (students can confirm they've read it) and optional student comments returned to the teacher, helping close the feedback loop

This is where Teach Edge becomes more than "AI marking". It turns assessment into usable evidence for teaching.

Why this matters for workload and learning

When assessment data is retained and organised in one place, teachers spend less time:

• moving information between systems
• manually collating class trends
• reconstructing evidence for reporting
• guessing whether feedback was read or acted on

And because students can complete second attempts with changes clearly visible, it becomes much easier to see whether feedback is improving writing and understanding — not just generating comments.

As one teacher put it:

"The class feedback summaries make it easy to identify common areas for improvement… and the student tracking data is invaluable for monitoring individual progress over time."
Helen Hill, Business and Economics Teacher, The Misbourne

Teacher control and professional judgement

Teach Edge is designed to support assessment for learning, not replace professional judgement.

• AI feedback is reviewed and editable by teachers
• teachers decide what students see
• teachers can choose a short feedback mode where detailed commentary may be overwhelming
• teachers can print individual feedback, or generate printable feedback packs for an entire class (for schools that prefer paper-based feedback in some contexts)

In other words: the system adapts to the teacher, not the other way around.

Another school leader described the impact like this:

"It's enabled us to give around ten times more detailed feedback within our normal workload…"
Michael Healer, Head of Economics, London Academy of Excellence

Personalised tutoring with teacher oversight

Teach Edge also includes personalised AI-assisted tutoring designed for formative assessment.

Teachers set the topic (as broad or as specific as they like). Students then have one-to-one tutoring conversations. Each session begins with a short multiple-choice baseline check, and then proceeds in a Socratic, step-by-step way.

Crucially, these conversations are visible to teachers. Teachers can:

• review full tutoring transcripts for an individual student
• view summaries of a student's understanding and misconceptions
• generate class-level summaries highlighting common gaps

That makes tutoring usable for Assessment for Learning, rather than isolated "chatbot practice".

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