Draft report comments that sound like you wrote them

Draft report comments that sound like you wrote them

The wrong way to use AI on report comments is the way most staffrooms are quietly doing it right now. Paste class list into ChatGPT. Ask for a report comment for each student. Get twenty-seven paragraphs that all use the phrase "consistently demonstrates", all praise "growth", all recommend "continued application", and all sound as if the same person wrote them at the same moment about students that person has never met. Which is what happened. The parents can tell. The kids can tell. The head of English can tell. And, over three reporting cycles, the goodwill that the report cycle used to build gets quietly burned. The right way is closer to what a good senior colleague does. Sit down with one honest sentence about the student in front of you, one piece of evidence, one thing you actually want them to do next term, and let the model handle the register, the length, the tone, and the "how do I say this without it sounding like a warning". Below is the prompt for that version.

The prompt

You are helping me draft end-of-semester report comments for my class in an Australian [PRIMARY / SECONDARY / TERTIARY] school. Each comment is going into [COMPASS / SEQTA / SENTRAL / XUNO] and will be read by the parent, the student, and next year's teacher.

Your job is NOT to invent a comment for each student. Your job is to take the honest one-line I write for each student, plus the evidence I give you, and turn it into a comment that reads like I wrote it, at the length the school asks for, without the phrases that make report comments sound like report comments.

CONTEXT
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL, e.g. Year 9]
- Subject and semester: [e.g. Year 9 English, Semester 1]
- The two or three learning outcomes the semester was built around: [PASTE, in your own words, one line each]
- Comment length the school asks for: [e.g. 60 words per student, 80 words, 3 sentences]
- School reporting style: [FORMAL THIRD PERSON / SECOND PERSON TO STUDENT / MIXED]
- The rubric or achievement scale the grade is against: [e.g. A to E, VELS, working towards / at / above]

STRUCTURE FOR EVERY COMMENT (in this order, always)
1. ONE SENTENCE: what the student has actually done well this semester, tied to a specific outcome above. Not "shown effort". Not "growth". A specific move they made. If I have said nothing genuine, write "Nothing genuine to say here yet" and stop. Do not pad.
2. ONE SENTENCE: the evidence for that. A task, a moment, a piece of work. Where possible, reference it specifically ("in the persuasive writing task", "during the source analysis"). Not "in class discussions".
3. ONE SENTENCE: the ONE thing I want them to work on next semester. Only one. Named specifically. Actionable, not aspirational. Not "continue to develop".
4. OPTIONAL FOURTH SENTENCE, only if length allows: how they might practise that at home, or the specific move they should try. If length does not allow, cut this, do not compress the others.

STYLE RULES (these are the difference between a real comment and slop)
- Australian English throughout. Realise, colour, behaviour, analyse.
- No em-dashes. No en-dashes. Anywhere. Full stops, commas, parentheses only.
- NEVER use, in any comment, any of the following phrases: "consistently demonstrates", "shown growth", "has been a pleasure to teach", "engaging learner", "continues to develop", "reach their full potential", "shows promise", "with continued application", "is a valued member of the class", "brings a positive attitude", "moving forward", "in the coming semester", "solid understanding", "wonderful addition". These phrases make the comment sound like every other comment, and parents skip them.
- Do not use the word "effort" more than once across the whole class. Vary the verb. What is the student actually DOING that shows the thing you would call effort?
- Do not start two consecutive comments with the same word.
- Do not open with the student's name. The system prints the name. Open with the verb.
- Do not include the grade in the comment. The grade sits in its own field.
- Do not say the student "should" do something. Say what the student "can" do next, or what "will help" next semester.

INPUTS FROM ME
For each student I will give you exactly three things:
- NAME (first name only, in the comment I will replace it with system tokens).
- ONE HONEST LINE from me. Not the polished version. What I would actually say to a colleague at the printer. E.g. "Bright but coasts. Wrote the best essay in the class in Week 4 then handed in nothing for Week 8." or "Quiet, has fallen behind on the writing tasks, does the reading, needs someone to sit with her once a week."
- ONE OR TWO PIECES OF EVIDENCE. The task result, the moment, the observation. E.g. "Task 2 (essay) B+, Task 3 (SAC) C, class discussion contributions low all term."

OUTPUT
For each student, produce the comment as ONE paragraph in the school's requested length, following the four-sentence structure above (or three sentences if length is tight). No headings. No bullet points. No "here is the comment for [name]". Just the comment, one per student, separated by a blank line.

THEN, AT THE VERY END, PRODUCE A REVIEW STACK FOR ME (for my eyes, not for the parent).

REVIEW STACK
- REPEATED PHRASES: any phrase that appears in more than three comments across the class. Report them, so I can vary. If none, say "none".
- COMMENTS THAT READ AS AI: any single comment in the batch that reads too smooth, too balanced, or too generic. Flag it by student name and one line on why.
- THE ONE STUDENT I SHOULD READ TWICE: the comment most likely to draw a parent reply. Not because it is negative, but because it names something a parent will want to talk about.
- MISSING EVIDENCE: any student where the honest line and the evidence do not line up (e.g. I wrote "great semester" but the tasks I gave you are C, C, D). Flag it and ask me which is right before I publish.

STUDENTS BELOW:

[STUDENT 1]
Name:
One honest line:
Evidence:

[STUDENT 2]
Name:
One honest line:
Evidence:

(and so on)

What it does well

Two moves make this the version worth running. First, the ban-list. Every phrase in it is a phrase that would appear seven or eight times across a set of comments generated the lazy way, and each one is a reason parents skim rather than read. Cutting them forces the model to say the specific thing you asked for, which is what a report comment is meant to do. Second, the review stack at the end is the piece nobody builds and every teacher needs. Any comment set produced quickly has repeated phrasing hiding in it. The model is a good auditor of its own output when you ask it directly, and thirty seconds spent reading the "repeated phrases" list is what stops seven comments about seven different children reading like the same paragraph.

Where it falls over

The prompt cannot rescue a class you do not know well enough to write one honest line about. The honest one-line is the whole prompt. If your one-line is "hard-working student, capable of more", the comment that comes back will be the generic slop you were trying to avoid, and it will not be the model's fault. If you cannot write one specific sentence about a student from your own head, the report comment is not the problem. The next fortnight of teaching is. This prompt is also not a substitute for a proofread. It will occasionally produce a comment that is technically clean but does not sound like your voice, particularly for the students you have the strongest read on. Read every comment. Rewrite the ones that sound off. The other twenty are still an hour of your Saturday back.

Try it like this

For a Year 8 Humanities class of 27: run the prompt in batches of eight. The review stack is more useful across a smaller batch, and you can adjust the honest-line detail on the next batch based on what the model flagged as "reads as AI" on the first.

For VCE / Year 12: the honest line and the evidence carry more weight because the parent audience is more attentive and the comment often ends up quoted back at you at a parent-teacher meeting. Add the last SAC score and the predicted study score band into the evidence line for each student. The specificity is what makes senior report comments defensible.

For a primary generalist writing across English, Maths and inquiry: run the prompt three times, once per subject, with the same honest line per student and different evidence for each subject. The comments will vary in substance without varying in voice, which is exactly what you want on the printed report.

If you only have an evening: skip the "next term" fourth sentence and produce three-sentence comments across the whole class in one pass. The three-sentence version is the honest one. The four-sentence version is the polished one. Both are acceptable. A generic four-sentence comment on every kid is worse than a specific three-sentence one on each.

The report your parents actually read is the one that names something they had not already seen on Compass. This prompt makes that comment cheap enough to write, so you can afford to write it for every student instead of only the top five and bottom five.