We built the marking assistant we wanted to be able to trust
Marky marks GCSE, AS and A-level papers in maths, biology, chemistry and physics against the official mark scheme, and returns the marks with the reasoning attached. A class set that takes about five hours by hand comes back in 20 to 30 minutes.
That is the entire product. This page is about the things a marketing page usually leaves out: what we actually measure, where the software is still wrong, and who is accountable when it is.
To make fast, high-quality feedback something every department can afford to give on every piece of work, rather than a luxury rationed to the sets there is time to mark.
Give teachers their time back
Marking is the single biggest call on a teacher's evenings and weekends. Five hours of a class set should not be the price of knowing how a cohort is doing.
Close the gap between sitting and knowing
Feedback a fortnight late lands as a grade. Feedback the same week lands as something a student can still act on, while they remember what they were thinking.
Earn the trust rather than assume it
Software that touches student work has to show its reasoning and publish its error rate. We would rather be checkable than impressive.
Why we started
Marking is the part of teaching that scales worst. A department that wants to run frequent mocks has to weigh every round against the weekends it will cost, and the honest answer is usually to run fewer of them. So the assessment that would tell a teacher the most gets rationed, and it gets rationed hardest in the term when it would matter most.
The second cost is slower to show up. By the time a set comes back a fortnight later, the class has moved on, the student has forgotten what they were thinking, and the feedback lands as a grade rather than as something to act on. Turnaround is not a convenience feature. It is most of whether the feedback works at all.
We built Marky so a department can mark a full cohort in an evening's gap rather than an evening, and run the extra mock rather than talking itself out of it.
Who we are
Marky is a British software company based in West Sussex, trading as Marky under Hasan Consultancy Limited. We make one thing: marking software for secondary school science and maths departments. It is not a side product of something else, and there is no other business it has to fit around.
The same people design the marking pipeline, measure its accuracy and answer the support email. When a head of department writes to say a mark looks wrong on question 6(c), it reaches someone who can open the script, see what the model read, and change how it reads it. That loop is the reason the product improves, and we have built the company around keeping it short.
We build for UK secondary schools specifically: GCSE, AS and A-level, marked against the official mark schemes of AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, WJEC/Eduqas and CCEA. We are not an American product with a British spelling option. The grade boundaries, the mark scheme conventions and the language in the feedback are the ones your department already uses.
Schools are the customer
Departments pay for marked papers, and that is the whole of how we make money. Student data is not a second revenue stream.
Built and run in the UK
A UK company working to UK GDPR, for UK qualifications and UK exam boards, with a registered office you can look up at Companies House.
Narrow on purpose
Four subjects, three levels, one job done properly. We say no to a great deal in order to keep saying yes to that.
How we think about the problem
Four commitments shape most of the decisions we make, including the ones that cost us features.
A number without its denominator is not evidence
Every accuracy figure we publish carries the sample it came from and the method that produced it. Our benchmark is 3,276 question sections marked by a verified examiner, and we publish where the software agrees exactly, within one mark and within two, because the tolerance you choose changes the headline. We would rather quote a lower number we can defend than a higher one we cannot.
The teacher holds the pen
Marky proposes a mark and shows the mark scheme point it came from. A teacher can change any of it, and the marks that go to students are the ones the teacher approves. Work the software is unsure about is flagged for review rather than quietly averaged, so attention lands where it is worth spending. Nothing here is designed to mark a cohort while nobody looks.
Student work is the school's, not ours
We are the data processor for student data and act under the school's instructions. Scripts are processed to mark them and for nothing else. Schools can export everything through the subject access request tooling, and our privacy policy sets out the lawful bases and retention in full rather than in summary.
One price, printed on the page
A marked paper is £1.20. There are no per-teacher seats, no feature tiers and no monthly caps, and a department buys a year's allowance sized to its own mocks. Instant marking is faster because a script draws two papers from that same allowance instead of one, which is why it costs £2.40 a script. It is not a plan, and it does not change the price of a paper.
What we can show you
These are the figures behind the product, each drawn from the same benchmark of 3,276 question sections marked by a verified examiner, spanning maths at GCSE and AS and physics at AS and A-level.
The accuracy page gives the method, the per-subject splits and the limits of what this evidence supports. We would rather you read it than take the headline.
What we will not claim
A tool used on student work should be honest about its edges. These are ours.
It is not an examiner, and it does not replace one. Marky is a first pass that a teacher checks. It is not moderation, it carries no exam board endorsement, and no mark it proposes is a prediction of an awarding body outcome.
Handwriting is the hard part, not the marking. Most of the marks we get wrong come from misreading a busy or faint script rather than from misapplying the mark scheme. Dense working, heavy crossing out and pale pencil are where to expect errors, which is exactly why every mark is shown with the working it was read from.
Four subjects, deliberately. Maths, biology, chemistry and physics, at GCSE, AS and A-level. We would rather be measurably good at these than broadly mediocre across every subject on the timetable, so we will keep saying no to the others until the evidence says otherwise.
Turnaround is typical, not guaranteed. Twenty to thirty minutes for a class set on Instant and about sixty on the standard lane describe normal running. Busy periods are slower, and we would rather say so here than in a footnote after you have bought.
The most useful thing you can do with any of this is not believe it. Mark ten papers yourself, run the same ten through Marky and compare. That is the test we would apply, and it is the one we recommend to every department that asks.
Company details
There is no call centre between you and the people who wrote the software: an email to hello@markyedu.com reaches them.
- Legal entity
- Hasan Consultancy Limited, trading as Marky
- Company number
- 15706745, registered in England and Wales
- Registered office
- Littlehaven House, 24-26 Littlehaven Lane, Horsham, West Sussex RH12 4HT
- VAT registration
- GB 467 9659 18
- General and sales enquiries
- hello@markyedu.com
- Data protection and accessibility
- hello@markyedu.com
Our privacy policy, terms of service and accessibility statement say what we are bound to, and the changelog records what has actually shipped.
Try it on papers you have already marked
The fastest way to judge any of this is against your own marking. The trial runs for three days and covers ten papers, and schools do not need a card to start.