Written comments

After marking a student, IOA Marker can draft written comments addressed to them. The AI uses your overall mark, indicators, and notes to produce personalized feedback. You edit, approve, and send.

How it works

1. You mark: Record the overall mark, set indicators, write rough notes
2. Switch to Feedback view: The marking screen has two views — Capture and Feedback
3. Click Generate: AI drafts comments based on your inputs
4. Edit: Review and refine the draft in the text editor
5. Save feedback: Click the save button to finalize the feedback

You can also click Refine to ask AI to adjust the draft — make it shorter, add a specific point, change the tone.

What AI sees

When drafting comments, AI receives:

• The overall mark
• Which indicators you set and their values
• Context field values (e.g., the student’s topic or project title)
• Your freeform notes
• The assessment’s instructions (what students were asked to do)
• The comments configuration (tone, length, structure, grade bands)

AI does not see student names or IDs — the prompt refers to “the student” generically.

Comments configuration

You configure how AI drafts comments in the assessment setup:

Tone: How the feedback should sound

• Warm and encouraging
• Supportive but honest
• Professional and balanced
• Formal academic
• Direct and constructive

Length: How much to write

• One paragraph, 1-2 paragraphs, 2-3 paragraphs, 3-5 paragraphs
• Bullet points only
• One paragraph followed by bullet points
• Or by word count: 50-100, 100-150, 150-200, 200-300 words

Structure: How to organize the feedback

• Start with strengths, then areas for improvement
• Start with areas for improvement, end with encouragement
• Interweave strengths and suggestions throughout
• Follow the flow of the assessment chronologically

Grade bands: Suggested language for different mark ranges. Two presets available:

• 60-80 scale (where 60 is “good”)
• 50-70 scale (where 50 is “good”)

Custom instructions: Anything else AI should know — house style, specific phrases to use or avoid, additional structural preferences.

Staleness

If you change the overall mark or indicators after generating comments, they’re marked stale. This signals that the comments may no longer match the marks. You can regenerate or leave them as-is.

Writing comments yourself

AI is optional. You can:

• Write comments from scratch in the editor
• Generate a draft and rewrite it entirely
• Skip written comments altogether

The rest of the app works the same either way.

The line we won’t cross

AI drafts comments. Deterministic code computes scores.

Every student’s scores come from your inputs and the app’s arithmetic — not from AI. Same inputs, same scores, every time. The derive algorithm is pure math; it doesn’t depend on a language model having a good day.

This matters for:

• Appeals: You can explain exactly how any score was computed
• Moderation: External reviewers can reproduce any score by hand
• Stability: A rubric built today produces the same scores years from now, even if AI models change

AI helps you write faster. It never decides a grade.