Freeing up teachers’ time with automated essay grading
Faculty developed essay-scoring capabilities to enable Elastik to expand its suite of edtech products.
Schools using the tool across the UK and Australia
Essays capable of being evaluated in under 10 minutes
Up to 15 hours a week saved in teacher grading time
Background
Elastik provides an edtech service that allows teachers and schools to upload performance data and receive AI-generated analysis that highlights gaps in student learning. Elastik saw an opportunity in the market to expand its offerings by providing automated marking of essays written by 10 and 11-year olds so teachers could spend more time helping each student to progress.
“Education will be one of the first sectors where AI-powered solutions can make a tangible difference in the lives of young people and teachers. This was a flagship project to demonstrate that.”
David Railton, Customer Director
Faculty
Solution
Faculty worked alongside Elastik to build AI technology to mark essays in real-time against set criteria including spelling, punctuation and grammar. The solution was powered by an LLM trained on over 3,000 teacher-marked essays. A separate AI model then scored essays, generating an overall mark as well as scores for individual sections so teachers can see areas for improvement. Teachers can use their judgement to amend scores if appropriate, with all learning used to continuously improve the model.
To support real-time grading at scale, Faculty built the underlying platform infrastructure on AWS. The solution uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for scalable compute power, alongside Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to manage the high-volume message queuing required when processing thousands of essays simultaneously.
Impact
By automating marking, teachers have more time to better serve the needs of pupils through more personalised support. Elastik already sees potential for extending this capability to market high-stakes exams.
“Through our collaboration with Faculty, we can empower teachers to provide more personalised support, enabling students to improve their performance.”