Case study
Faster marking. More context on how each paper was written.
Penmate assesses English writing against Cambridge English criteria and sends feedback to the student after submission. The teacher also gets more context on how the paper was produced: highlighted sentences, writing behaviour, and a short summary rather than a single verdict. The Headers team develops and runs Penmate.
- Product
- Penmate
- Field
- Education, English teaching
- Status
- Live in schools across several countries
- Headers role
- Product, engineering, and operations
Marking essays eats a teacher's evenings
An English teacher marks dozens of essays a week. Each one gets read, scored against a rubric, annotated for errors, and given written feedback by hand. That is hours of work you cannot rush and rarely get paid for properly.
The Cambridge English Writing rubric has four dimensions: Content, Communicative Achievement, Organisation, and Language. Scoring them consistently across a whole class, and over time, is hard even for an experienced teacher.
A finished paper alone is often no longer enough to tell whether a student wrote it. Reliable automated detection keeps getting harder. Teachers need several forms of context and their knowledge of the student, not another binary score.
Assessment, feedback, and context for the teacher
The student receives a link and writes directly in Penmate. After submission, the system assesses Content, Communicative Achievement, Organisation, and Language. The student immediately receives scores, strengths, and clear points to improve.
Teachers can use Cambridge English tasks from B1 to C2 or create their own. For each paper, they see the full assessment, the student's progress, and, when WIRE is enabled, context on how the text was produced. The final judgement always stays with the teacher.
Assessment against clear criteria
Penmate scores four areas on a scale from 0 to 5. Teachers can use Cambridge English exam tasks or create their own.
Writing context without a verdict
WIRE combines several signals. It highlights sentences that need attention, shows how the text was produced, and sums up the findings. Only the teacher sees the result, and it is neither proof nor a final verdict.
Feedback straight after submission
Students do not need an account. They submit through a personal link and immediately receive scores, strengths, and points to work on.
Less marking, more time to teach
Class views show common weak points and each student's progress, so teachers can focus the next lesson where the group needs it.
What Penmate delivers
- 1.97 s
- to assess one piece
- thousands of pieces daily
- system capacity
- 4000+ tests
- guard reliability
Teachers and schools use Penmate across several countries. These figures describe the system's operation, not student outcomes, grading accuracy, or the accuracy of writing-integrity checks.
Want to build a product like this?
We designed, built, and run Penmate ourselves. Show us your idea and we will tell you how it could be built and what running it would actually cost.
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