About MarkMate

Hi, I'm Cheryl. I'm Head Teacher Administration in a NSW secondary school, teaching across English and HSIE. I built MarkMate.

Every teacher knows the feeling. A stack of 30 essays to mark, each needing detailed, actionable feedback that students will read and use. It takes hours.

And students often don't know if their work is on track until they get the final grade back, when it's too late to improve.

It was a Sunday in March. I was on my fifth Year 12 Ancient History essay of the night, and I'd just typed the comment “Source integration needs work, embed the source within your argument rather than dropping it in” for the third time that hour.

I closed the laptop and counted what was left. Twenty-five essays. At ten minutes each, that was four more hours of typing the same six paragraphs of feedback in slightly different words.

Then I caught myself thinking what I always think when I'm marking late. The students who needed the feedback most often weren't the ones who'd read it. I was about to spend four hours writing feedback that wouldn't change anything for them.

I tried the obvious things.

Pre-written feedback templates. Faster, but the kids could tell. Generic feedback gets read once and ignored.

Audio feedback recorded on my phone. The kids listened, but I was still spending the same time, just speaking instead of typing.

ChatGPT with a careful prompt. Quick to generate, but it didn't know my rubric. Half the time it told a Band 4 essay it was strong work. The other half it told a Band 6 essay it needed more analysis. The calibration was random.

None of those things saved time and held the line on quality.

I built a tool that does what I do.

It reads the task notification, the rubric, and the marking criteria. It marks against those, not a generic essay-grading template. It writes the feedback I'd write if I had unlimited time on every student. It catches the things I miss when I'm tired.

The kids see the same kind of feedback I'd write by hand, with the same calibration to the rubric. They can revise, re-check, and submit when the work is ready.

What it does for you

You're the teacher in the story, not me. MarkMate gives your students rubric-aligned feedback on their drafts before they submit, on typed work and handwritten exam practice both. They can revise and re-check until the work is ready, building the habit of self-assessment that carries through senior school and beyond.

You get hours back. You get a private AI detection report on every submission, so you can mark with confidence about what each student actually wrote. You stay the final voice on every grade.

On my first real test in my own classroom, MarkMate saved me more than 6 hours on a single Year 12 class set. The feedback was as detailed and rubric-aligned as anything I would have written by hand. The kids read it, because it was specific to their work.

If you want the full workflow, read How I marked 30 Year 12 Ancient History essays in 14 minutes.

When I'm not building MarkMate or running my faculty, I'm probably out with my dog.