What if marking could fit into the gaps of a teacher’s day — the ten minutes in the staff room, the bus ride home, the lull before a parents’ evening — instead of demanding a four-hour block on a Sunday evening? That’s the idea behind Teacher Marking Assistant, a new web-based app designed to make marking portable, quick to set up, and genuinely sustainable.

Marking that travels with you

Open the app on a laptop in the staff room and mark for ten minutes between lessons. Pick it up on a tablet on the bus home. Carry on from a phone while waiting for a meeting to start. Every annotation, every score, every grade saves automatically and syncs across devices, so picking up where you left off takes seconds.

Twenty minutes on the metro can chip through four or five papers. A free period in the staff room can finish another six. The dead time between school and dinner becomes the moment a class quietly gets marked — and by the time the front door is in sight, the pile is already shorter.

How the marking loop works

Teachers upload scanned exam papers as PDFs. Marking happens on a clean canvas with all the symbols teachers actually use: tick, cross, ECF, BOD, half-marks, comment boxes, highlighter, freehand pen and custom text stamps. The app counts the ticks, calculates the percentage, applies your grade boundaries, and files everything in per-student folders. One click sends marked PDFs back to students by email — and to parents, when their addresses are on file.

It runs in any modern browser, on any device. PC, Mac, iPad, Android tablet, phone — all work the same way, all stay in sync.

Formative assessment that actually happens

One workflow worth flagging that quietly transforms how mock papers are used: scan the papers, hand the unmarked originals back to the class, and have students self-mark against the scheme first. Then share your marked copy with the students.

Now they engage with the mark scheme. They can see exactly where their answer fell short, and the conversation shifts from “what did I get?” to “how do I get there next time?”.

Who it’s for

Teacher Marking Assistant is built for any teacher who marks student work, and it’s especially useful for:

• Teachers who want to mark anywhere without carrying a stack of papers.
• Subjects where marks build up across many small ticks — sciences, MFL, maths.
• Teachers who set regular multiple-choice quizzes.
• Anyone marking the same paper across a whole class.
• Teachers who want to encourage their students to engage with the mark scheme, not just look at a score.

• EdTech