About this marker
Who made it
I’m Sebastian. I finished the HSC with an ATAR of 97.95 and I now study Actuarial Studies at UNSW. I built this because the slowest part of improving at HSC English is the wait: you write a practice essay, hand it in, and find out a fortnight later what was wrong with it — by which time you have written three more the same way.
How it was calibrated
The marking is tuned against 57 essays whose real marks are known — every one of them scored by a human before it was ever shown to this tool:
- 13 genuine HSC scripts, with the marks they were actually awarded
- 37 essays from NESA’s published standards packages — the annotated samples NESA releases to show what each band looks like
- 7 teacher-marked trial and assessment responses
Those essays are the test. When the marking changes, it is re-run across all of them and the new version only ships if it lands closer to the human marks than the old one did. Several versions have been built, measured, and thrown away for failing that.
How the mark is worked out
Your essay is assessed against six criteria drawn from NESA’s marking guidelines and band descriptors — response to the question, argument and thesis, analysis of language forms and features, use of textual detail, engagement with the module’s ideas, and control of language. Each is rated independently.
The mark out of 20 is then calculated in code from those six ratings, using fixed weights. It is never asked for directly. That matters more than it sounds: it is why the same essay submitted twice gets the same mark, and why the mark can be traced back to specific judgements rather than an overall impression.
What it is not
It is not affiliated with NESA and not endorsed by them, your school, or any examination body. The marks are estimates for practice — not predictions of your HSC result, and they carry no official weight.
It marks strictly, particularly at the top of the range: a response that would earn a 19 from a marking centre will often come back a mark or two lower here. Read a low mark as a list of things to fix, not a forecast.
And it is software. It can miss things a good teacher would catch, and it has no idea what your class discussed or what your teacher wants. It is a fast second opinion between teacher feedback, not a replacement for it.
See for yourself
Rather than take any of this on trust, there is a complete marked essay on the site — the whole report, exactly as the tool produced it, with nothing tidied up or chosen to flatter.
Questions, or something looks wrong? Email essaymarker.hsc@gmail.com. essaymarker.com.au is small enough that I read everything myself.