James Cammell used to spend six hours marking a single class set of essays.
Now it takes him about 40 minutes.
That difference didn't come from cutting corners, lowering standards, or giving less feedback. It came from changing how feedback was generated — while keeping teachers firmly in control.
The context
At Westlake Boys' High School, over 400 senior students sit NCEA English standards each year. Like most English departments, teachers knew students needed more essay practice — particularly in the lead-up to externals.
But the workload reality made that impossible.
"Setting lots of practice essays was impossible in later terms," James explains. "Now it's amazing because we can set far more practice work. WriteWise opens up revision in a way we couldn't do before."
What changed
In Term 2, Westlake Boys partnered with WriteWise, a platform that uses AI to:
- Analyse student essays
- Suggest provisional grades
- Generate detailed, NCEA-aligned feedback and annotations
Crucially, teachers review everything before students see it. Nothing is released automatically.
James describes the experience simply:
"I agreed with pretty much all the marks."
The time impact
The results were immediate and measurable:
- 10–12 minutes → ~2 minutes per essay (83% reduction)
- 6 hours → 40 minutes per class
- 1–2 weeks → 24–48 hours for feedback
That's over five hours reclaimed per assignment.
Over a term, this adds up to 10–20 hours — time teachers can reinvest in:
- Setting more practice essays
- One-on-one student mentoring
- Actually having weekends and evenings back
What this meant for students
Faster feedback meant students could:
- Remember what they wrote
- Act on feedback immediately
- Write again, and improve again
In a controlled classroom trial with Year 13 students:
- The average improvement was 1.5 NCEA grade steps
- The failure rate dropped by 66%
- Merit and Excellence results increased by 300%
As one student put it:
"I liked that I could improve my work in real time instead of waiting weeks to hear back."
The bigger picture
The real win wasn't just time saved — it was intensive revision becoming possible at the exact moment students needed it most.
What was once unmanageable became normal practice.