Work / GCSEWriting
GCSEWriting
Examiner-marked GCSE English essays, from handwritten page to feedback in 3 working days
-2.png)
The Situation
GCSEWriting helps UK students prepare for their GCSE English Language and Literature exams by writing practice essays and getting feedback from real exam-board examiners. Families needed a simple path from sign-up to first essay, clear monthly plans, and feedback they could act on. The client also needed tools for examiners, schools and their own team, all in one product.
The Constraint
Feedback quality depends on human examiners, so the product had to support a real marking workflow while still feeling fast to students and parents. Students practise by hand, as they would in the exam, so their handwritten pages and PDFs had to become readable text before an examiner could mark them. Trials, plans and monthly essay limits had to stay consistent everywhere, and exam boards the service doesn’t cover had to be handled honestly.
What we did
We built and still maintain the web app and its backend. The marketing site, onboarding, student dashboard, examiner tools and admin panel all live in one app, with each user seeing only what their role allows.
A real marking workflow: examiners work from a queue of submitted essays, save unfinished feedback to complete later, and keep records of everything they’ve marked. Feedback can include written comments, voice notes, quoted essay snippets and model examples. Students see each essay move from pending to in review to completed, with a “New” badge until they open their feedback.
Handwriting to text with AI: students can type their essay or upload photos and PDFs. AI on the backend turns them into text the examiner can read, and the student can correct it before submitting. AI only transcribes. Examiners do all the marking.
Guided onboarding with a trial: onboarding asks for the subject, exam board and goals, then explains the method of practising one essay type several times in a row. A 14-day trial checkout is embedded in onboarding, so families don’t leave the flow to pay. Plans allow 2, 3 or 5 essays a month.
Tools for the team: the admin panel covers students, submissions, usage stats, schools and classes, examiner accounts, marking categories and the model example library. Onboarding experiments run through GrowthBook, and the blog runs on Sanity.
The trade-off
We kept marking fully human and used AI only to turn handwriting and PDFs into text. Automatic grading would have been cheaper and faster, but it would have undercut the reason families pay: feedback from real examiners. The cost is more examiner time per essay, and AI transcription occasionally needs a quick correction from the student before they submit. AI speeds up the intake, and examiners own the feedback.
Outcome
| Metric | Value | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | Live web app at gcsewriting.com | Client confirmation | Oct 2026 |
| Engagement | About 23 months, ongoing | Repository history and client | Nov 2024 to Oct 2026 |
| Feedback turnaround | Within 3 working days | Product promise | Oct 2026 |
| Roles supported | 5 (student, school student, examiner, supervisor, admin) | Product | Oct 2026 |
| Plans | 3 tiers: 2, 3 or 5 essays a month | Product | Oct 2026 |
What we would do differently
We would keep a single onboarding flow from the start. As the client tested new sign-up journeys, older versions stayed in the product alongside the new ones, so each pricing or plan change had to be checked in several places. One flow, with experiments switched on and off by feature flags, would have made changes faster and safer.
More work
See all work →
LTB Forms
Legal tech, landlord and tenant services.Web and SaaS engineering · QA as a service
Ontario landlords go from payment to a completed, Board-format N4 notice in one sitting
-1.png)
VENDR
Wedding services marketplaceWeb and SaaS engineering · QA as a service
A two-sided wedding marketplace, live in Canada four months after the first line of code
Ready when the work has to be right the first time.
A 30-minute scoping call with a senior engineer, designer or growth lead. You will leave with a written view of scope, risks and a realistic timeline, whether or not you hire us.
12 years40+ shipped products6 industries
Karachi and Sharjah