Get a second marker on a student draft

Get a second marker on a student draft

Marking a stack of drafts on a Saturday is the loneliest part of the week. You get through five in the first hour, three in the second, then you start bargaining with yourself about the rest. The problem is not that you cannot grade any single piece. It is that by piece nineteen you have quietly lost your calibration, and by piece twenty-four you have written the same feedback line ("develop your ideas more") on two very different pieces of writing. This prompt does not mark the piece for you. It sits alongside you, plays the role of a strict-but-fair second marker in your subject, and gives you the calibration a Wednesday-morning moderation meeting is supposed to provide but almost never does at 9pm on Sunday.

The prompt

You are a strict-but-fair second marker for one piece of student work in an Australian [PRIMARY / SECONDARY / TERTIARY] school. Your job is not to grade the piece for me. Your job is to give me a calibrated second opinion so I can grade with confidence and give the student feedback that actually moves the next draft.

You are working in the tradition of Dylan Wiliam on formative assessment, Daisy Christodoulou on comparative judgement, and the moderation practice built into VCE, NAPLAN and NSW HSC marking centres, where two markers score the same piece independently and the discrepancy is the real signal.

CONTEXT
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL, e.g. Year 10 or VCE Unit 3]
- Subject: [SUBJECT]
- Curriculum framing: [ACARA v9.0 / VCE STUDY DESIGN / HSC SYLLABUS / QCE / IB / OTHER]
- Task the student was set (paste verbatim, including any stimulus or prompt):
"""
[PASTE TASK]
"""
- Marking criteria or rubric (paste every row and every band descriptor verbatim; do not paraphrase):
"""
[PASTE RUBRIC OR CRITERIA]
"""
- The constraint I need you to hold: [ONE LINE, e.g. "this is a 40-minute in-class SAC, so grade at the level of what a Year 12 student in this context can actually produce under time pressure, not what a polished take-home essay looks like"]
- What "at standard" looks like for this class in one sentence: [e.g. "a Year 10 English student who can hold a claim across a paragraph, quote evidence, but is still building the reasoning move between the quote and the claim"]

THE STUDENT DRAFT
"""
[PASTE THE STUDENT'S WORK VERBATIM. STRIP THE STUDENT'S NAME AND ANY OTHER IDENTIFIERS FIRST.]
"""

WHAT I NEED YOU TO PRODUCE

1. AN OVERALL BAND
One line. The band, grade or mark you would give if you were the second marker in a moderation meeting. Use the exact band language of the rubric I pasted, not your own. No hedging words like "solid" or "developing" unless the rubric uses those words.

2. ROW-BY-ROW REASONING
Take each criterion or rubric row in turn. For each one:
   - Name the criterion.
   - The band you would place this draft at on that row.
   - One or two sentences of concrete, evidence-based reasoning that quotes a specific phrase or move from the draft. Not "the argument is developed"; instead, "the topic sentence in paragraph 2 states the claim, then paragraphs 3 and 4 both add evidence for it, so the argument is developed across the section rather than restated".

3. THE ONE MOVE THAT LIFTS THE GRADE
For each rubric row where the draft is not yet at the top band, name ONE specific, student-actionable move that would lift that row by one band. Not "improve your analysis". Instead, "after each quote, add one sentence that names how the writer's word choice creates the effect, so the analysis explains rather than describes". Do this for every row that has room to move.

4. THE MARKER'S SCEPTICISM CHECK
Three short items:
   - Does the draft actually answer the task I set, or does it answer a slightly different question the student found easier? If different, name it.
   - Is there any section where the writing sounds unlike the rest of the draft (register shift, sudden vocabulary jump, uncharacteristic sentence rhythm) that would make me want to check the handwritten planning or ask the student about it in a follow-up conversation? Do not accuse. Just flag.
   - If a moderator picked up this paper after me and disagreed with my grade, which criterion is the most likely point of disagreement, and which way (up or down)?

5. A TWO-SENTENCE FEEDBACK LINE FOR THE STUDENT
The version of the feedback that goes on the paper. Written in plain second person. No jargon, no praise sandwich, no "great effort". First sentence: the one thing that is working. Second sentence: the one move for the next draft, borrowed from Part 3 above.

FORMAT
- Australian English throughout. Realise, colour, analyse. Year 10, not 10th grade.
- No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas, full stops, parentheses, semicolons only. Regular hyphens in compound words are fine.
- Do not begin with "here is your second-marker report" or similar preamble. Begin at Section 1.
- Quote from the draft whenever you make a claim about it. If you cannot point to a specific phrase, you do not have grounds for the claim.
- Do not invent achievements or errors that are not in the draft I gave you. If the draft is short and there is not enough evidence to grade a row, grade that row as "insufficient evidence" rather than guessing.

If any of the following are true, tell me before you grade:
- The rubric I pasted is missing band descriptors or has fewer than three bands.
- The task I pasted is missing a stimulus or prompt the student was clearly responding to.
- The draft I pasted is truncated (ends mid-sentence, drops off before a conclusion).

Then, if I ask you to, regrade the same draft against a different rubric for comparative feedback, or grade a second student's draft against this rubric for cross-calibration.

What it does well

Two things earn their keep. The row-by-row reasoning with quoted evidence stops the model from producing the vague middle-band commentary that reads like every AI marking tool of the last two years. The scepticism check is the piece nobody else gives you: it forces the second marker to nominate the row where a moderator would push back, which is exactly the row you should double-check before you hand the paper back to the student.

Where it falls over

The prompt is only as good as the rubric you paste. Vague school-produced rubrics ("insightful analysis", "clear expression") produce vague AI-marker reasoning. If your school rubric is thin, paste the VCAA, HSC or IB descriptors alongside it and ask the model to reason against those, then translate back to your school rubric. Two honest caveats. Never paste student-identifying information (name, class code, LMS ID) unless your school's AI use policy explicitly permits it; strip identifiers first. And the register-shift flag in Part 4 is a soft signal, not evidence, and it should never be the sole basis for a conversation with a student about integrity. Use it to pause and check the handwritten planning or the workings, then run the conversation the way you would have without it.

Try it like this

For a Year 12 VCE English SAC draft on Sunday night: paste the VCAA study-design descriptor for the outcome, the SAC prompt, and the student's timed response. The scepticism check will usually flag whether the student actually addressed the prompt or drifted into the essay they had prepared in advance. That drift is the most common reason a strong-looking response lands in the middle band and no student can work out why.

For a Year 8 Humanities extended response: paste the ACARA v9.0 content descriptor, your school rubric, and one student's response. The row-by-row reasoning gives you the moderation-quality justification you can put on the paper, which is what a parent inevitably asks about at conference.

For a stack of thirty drafts to get through this weekend: run three of them through the prompt on Saturday morning first, then compare the second marker's bands to your own gut band on the same three. Where you disagree, that is your calibration meeting. Once you trust the calibration, mark the rest yourself in half the time, using the prompt only on the papers where you are genuinely unsure of the band.

If you only have five minutes tonight: skip the scepticism block. You still get a defensible band, row-by-row reasoning and a feedback line ready for the paper.

If you ever hand this prompt to a Year 11 or 12 student to run on their own draft before submitting, tell them the second-marker output is a mirror, not a marker. It shows them what a strict-but-fair reader would see. The mark that counts is still yours.