What does your checking actually cost?

Most centres have never worked this out, because the cost arrives as tired faculty rather than as an invoice. Four numbers you already know will tell you.

Nothing here is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser and we never see the numbers you type.

What the number usually means

The hours are the visible half. The more expensive half is the tests that never get set — a centre that knows each test costs a week of faculty time quietly runs fewer of them, and nobody counts the ones that did not happen. That argument is written out here.

The other half is turnaround. A paper returned the same evening teaches; the same paper ten days later gets looked at and put in a bag.

What this does not tell you

It does not tell you what ClassPulse would cost you, because that depends on pages rather than hours — and we do not publish a figure that would be wrong for a single batch and a four-branch school at once. The pricing page explains the model, and the first paper is checked free so the comparison starts from your own evidence rather than ours.

Common questions

What are the usual strategies for grading large classes faster?

The three that teachers actually use are marking question-by-question across every script rather than script-by-script, splitting a paper between teachers so each marks the questions they know best, and cutting the number of questions marked in full. The first two work and cost nothing. The third is the one that quietly removes the reason for setting the test.

Does a rubric make grading faster?

It makes it more consistent, which is not the same thing. Writing the rubric is itself an hour a paper, which is why most centres skip it and mark from memory — and marking from memory is where two teachers give the same answer different marks. Deriving the scheme from the question paper is an attempt to get the consistency without the hour; what a marking scheme contains is here.

How long does checking one answer sheet actually take?

Teachers estimate two minutes and measure four. The gap is the part nobody counts: finding where the answer to question eleven was written, re-reading a line, adding the section totals, and writing a comment worth reading. The calculator above uses your own figure, so put in the honest one.