A tool for teachers.
Paddle marks against your scheme, to your standard, and you can change and publish when you want.
The pedagogical case is simple: work that comes back the same lesson still means something to the student who wrote it.
Three steps, then it’s yours again
Setup takes about a minute, and students never make an account. The evening you would have spent on the pile is the reason it lands back on their desk tomorrow.
Paste your mark scheme
Exactly as you’d hand it to a colleague — bands, criteria, indicative content, whatever you already have. No template to fill in, no reformatting. Add a strong and a weak answer with your own marks and Paddle anchors to your standard.
Share one link
Students open it, type their first name, and paste or upload their work. No password, no app, no email address. You watch submissions arrive as they come in.
Review, then publish
Every mark arrives with the phrase from their work it was based on. Change anything you disagree with. Nothing reaches a student until you press publish — and when it does, they see what worked, the one thing to fix, and can be asked to go again.
The time it saves is the reason it works
Speed here is not a shortcut around the job — it is what makes the job land.
It comes back while they still care
Work handed in on Tuesday and returned three weeks later teaches nobody anything — they have forgotten what they were trying to do. Paddle turns a class set around in minutes, so you can give it back the same lesson, while the essay is still theirs.
The thirtieth script marked like the first
Paddle does not get tired at nine o’clock and does not know whose work it is. The mark a student gets depends on what they wrote, not on where they came in the pile.
A second attempt, marked from scratch
Ask for a resubmission and the new attempt is marked from scratch. They see the jump — 12 to 16 — and exactly what moved it. Acting on feedback is the part that teaches, and it is the part that usually never happens.
Work out which one you need
Drag to roughly what you mark in a month. One mark is one piece of work — a resubmission is a fresh mark, and anything over 1,250 words uses two.
Paddle in brief
Does it grade my students?
No — and it can’t. Paddle proposes a mark against your scheme and writes the feedback. You read it, change anything you disagree with, and publish. Nothing reaches a student until you press the button. Every criterion also shows the phrase from their work the mark was based on, so you’re checking it, not trusting it.
Will it mark like I mark?
Closer than you’d expect. Paste a strong and a weak answer with the marks you gave them and Paddle anchors to your standard rather than a generic one. Every mark comes with a confidence score, so you know which ones are worth a second look and which you can publish as they are.
Who makes it
Built in Brussels, developed alongside practising teachers, and tested against real marked scripts.
Why students actually read it
Most feedback gets a glance at the number. Paddle leads with one thing they did well and one thing to change next time, in language they’ll follow, and a tree that grows every time they score 60%+. It’s small, but it’s the difference between feedback being read and feedback being filed.
Resubmissions are the point
A student can be asked to go again. The new attempt is marked from scratch, and they see the jump — 12 to 16, and exactly what moved it. Acting on feedback is the part that teaches; Paddle makes it visible and worth doing. You can see both attempts side by side.
How marks work
One mark = one piece of work marked. A resubmission is a fresh mark, because Paddle reads it fresh. Anything over 1,250 words uses two, which you turn on per assignment — so a long-form essay never gets quietly billed twice. Your monthly credits reset each month; top-ups you buy sit in a separate balance and never expire, so they’re still there next term.
What Free gets you
25 marks a month, 5 classes and 10 assignments, with no card. That’s most of a class set marked, start to finish — enough to know whether Paddle marks the way you do. The only thing held back is example answers, which is how you teach Paddle your standard.
Why teachers upgrade
Because 30 doesn’t cover a term. Single is €8.99 for 150 marks a month, Double €15.99 for 300, Eight €44.99 for 900 — around six cents a mark, for work that takes fifteen minutes by hand. Paid plans unlock example answers and drop the class and assignment limits. Every plan marks to exactly the same standard: you’re paying for volume, not for better marking. No per-student fee, no overage, no surprise invoice — when the marks run out, marking stops.
Is this allowed?
In June 2025 the Department for Education backed teachers using AI for routine marking, provided the teacher stays in control of the outcome. That is exactly how Paddle is built: every mark is a proposal, you read it, change anything you disagree with, and nothing reaches a student until you publish it. If a Head of Department asks, that is the answer.
What happens to my students’ work?
It is stored in the EU and it is never used to train AI models. Students are asked for a first name only. You can delete an assignment, and every submission on it, at any time.
Is it fair to every student?
It is built to be, and the rules it marks under say so explicitly. It is told to ignore the student’s name entirely, to award nothing for presentation, handwriting or neatness, and never to penalise non-standard grammar or dialect where the meaning is clear — so a student writing in their second language is judged on their thinking, not on the accent of their prose. It is also told never to be moved by anything the work claims about itself: a header saying “A* exemplar” is worth nothing. Then a second pass audits the first, checking the score against the band it named and against the evidence quoted for it. Experienced human examiners agree with each other on a given script only about half the time, and they drift over an evening; the same scheme applied the same way to all thirty is the part a person genuinely cannot do.
What it isn’t for
Final reported grades, public examinations, or anything a student’s record depends on. Paddle is for formative work — classwork, homework, practice essays, the pile that never gets marked because there isn’t time.