About GradeDrive
Who we are.
Co-founded by a teacher who still teaches and the engineer who leads its development: classroom experience and technical depth on the same product.
Why use AI to mark exam papers at all?
Because most marking is the same mark scheme applied to the same question, over and over, mostly late at night. Checking a script against a fixed, unambiguous scheme is exactly the kind of task a computer does reliably. That’s the part GradeDrive takes on, so a teacher’s own time goes on the feedback and judgement calls that actually need a teacher.
Why GradeDrive, and not something else?
Because it only marks subjects where that scheme really is unambiguous, Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths today, tested against real scripts until the marks matched what a teacher would have given, not just until the output looked plausible. It was founded by school friends: one still teaching now, so it gets checked against a real classroom every week, and one who won’t ship a subject until the test results back it up.
How well does it actually mark?
Well enough to be leveraged at whole-school scale: an entire teaching team marking a full mock season on it, at the point in the year when the pile is biggest and the deadline does not move.
On Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths it holds the same scheme to the first script and the thirtieth with no drift in between, which is the part that gets hard for a human at eleven at night. It picks up partial credit and method marks, and it holds to the terminology a scheme actually requires, down to the wording the exam board publishes. Every mark it awards is shown against the criterion that produced it, so you can see the reasoning behind it and check it yourself.
What does it take to fit into how I already work?
Very little, and that is deliberate. Scan the pile once on the copier you already use, upload that single PDF along with the mark scheme you were going to mark against anyway, and confirm where one script ends and the next begins. Marks come back with the script on one side and the scheme on the other, and the ones you confirm export as a plain CSV into whatever markbook you already keep. There is no integration to set up, no new hardware to buy, and nothing to unpick if you decide to stop.
How do you know a mark is right?
You check it. Nothing GradeDrive produces is final until a teacher has looked at it, on every subject it supports.
Who’s behind it.
Ismail Bozdag, the teacher/lead practitioner
Ismail is a Physics teacher and lead practitioner at a UK secondary school, nine years in and still teaching today. That matters more than it sounds, because it means GradeDrive gets checked against how he actually marks a real class this week, not a memory of how marking used to feel. Automating exam marking isn't new to him: back in 2021 he built Moodle4Alevel and custom Moodle plugins and modules for real A-level focused solutions for tracking, monitoring and interventions. He shares an interest in tech with Abrar. Both friends naturally work collaboratively.
Abrar Mahmood, the engineer
Abrar is the technical expert behind GradeDrive and led its development. He has been writing software since he was eleven, when he started out in C, and it has stuck with him ever since. He is also a perfectionist: he won't put his name on anything until it meets his own standards, which is why he doesn't ship a subject until the marking behind it is genuinely deterministic and fair, tested against real scripts and real mark schemes, not just plausible-looking. Watching people close to him lose evenings to marking is the reason he wanted to build this in the first place. Outside of GradeDrive, his favourite animal is the alpaca, ask him about it and he'll show you more photos than you asked for.
Where we are, and where we’re going.
Today GradeDrive marks Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths: the subjects where a mark scheme has a defined right answer and two markers checking the same script tend to agree. We started there on purpose, because it is where we could prove the marking was fair before asking anyone to trust it with a real class.
Next comes a different kind of problem. English Literature is the clearest example: marking it well means judging an argument, not checking it against a fixed scheme, and we are still working on getting that right. Each new subject arrives when it clears the same bar the first four did, not before. Whatever the subject, nothing is ever confirmed without a teacher looking at it first.
Try it on one set of papers.
Not a trial that expires, not a card up front. Upload one mark scheme and one class set, and see whether you agree with the marks.