The Marking Problem Every Teacher Knows
You teach five classes. Each class has 30 students. That is 150 assignments sitting on your desk every time you set a task. Even at five minutes per paper, you are looking at twelve and a half hours of marking — on top of lesson planning, meetings, and actually teaching.
AI will not mark your students’ work for you. But it can cut the time you spend on repetitive parts of the process by half or more.
Using AI to Draft Feedback Comments
The most time-consuming part of marking is not reading the work — it is writing individualised feedback that is specific, constructive, and encouraging. AI is very good at this.
Here is a prompt you can adapt:
I am a high school English teacher marking a Year 11 essay on Macbeth. The student’s main argument is that Lady Macbeth is the true villain of the play. Their essay is generally well-structured but lacks textual evidence in paragraphs 2 and 3. The conclusion restates the introduction rather than synthesising the argument. Write 3 sentences of constructive feedback that acknowledges what they did well, identifies the two weaknesses, and gives a specific suggestion for improvement.
The result is a feedback comment that sounds like you wrote it — because you provided the judgement. The AI just did the writing.
Generating Rubric-Aligned Comments
If your school uses standardised rubrics, you can train AI to write comments that reference specific criteria:
Using the following rubric descriptors for a Grade B response — [paste rubric criteria] — write a report comment for a student who meets most criteria but needs improvement in critical analysis. Keep it under 40 words and use encouraging language.
This is particularly useful for report writing season when you need to write 150 individualised comments in a consistent format.
Creating Differentiated Resources
AI can generate multiple versions of the same resource for different ability levels in a fraction of the time:
Create three versions of a reading comprehension worksheet on the topic of climate change for Year 9 students. Version A is for students reading below grade level — use simplified vocabulary and include sentence starters for answers. Version B is for students at grade level. Version C is for advanced students — include an extension question that requires evaluating conflicting sources.
What used to take an entire Sunday afternoon now takes fifteen minutes of prompting and reviewing.
Building Question Banks
End-of-topic tests, revision quizzes, and exam practice papers all need questions. AI can generate them at scale:
Write 10 multiple-choice questions on photosynthesis for Year 10 Biology. Each question should have 4 options with one correct answer. Include 3 recall questions, 4 application questions, and 3 analysis questions. Provide the answer key separately.
You still need to review every question for accuracy — AI occasionally makes factual errors in specialist subjects — but it gets you 80% of the way there.
What About Academic Integrity?
The most common concern teachers have about AI is students using it to cheat. That is a valid concern, but it is a separate issue from teachers using AI to work more efficiently.
Using AI to help you write feedback comments or generate worksheets is no different from using a template or adapting a colleague’s resources. The professional judgement — what feedback to give, what questions to ask, what level of differentiation is needed — still comes from you.
The Teachers Who Are Thriving
The teachers who are getting the most from AI are not the most technical. They are the ones who understand their subject and their students well enough to prompt effectively and review critically.
They are saving hours every week on administrative tasks and spending that time where it matters most — with their students.
If you want structured training on how to do this across every aspect of your role, our AI for High School Teachers course covers lesson planning, marking, report writing, resource creation, and communication with parents — all with practical prompts you can use immediately.
