Status Update: New Marking Tool and Marking Journey - March 2025

With the May release on the horizon, we are finalising the last few steps in the development of the new marking tool and new marking journey. We want to share a brief progress report and outlook following our last update in February. We also want to announce the date when the legacy marking tool will be deprecated.

May 2025 Release

Our next release will occur on 2 May and you can find full details of the upcoming features in SYCAmore.

Two of these are linked directly to the new marking journey:

Personal Rubrics

From early May it will be possible for assessors to add personal rubrics to a flow on which they are an allocated assessor. Until now, it has not been possible for assessors to add personal rubrics when using the new marking tool. This functionality continues our work in bringing the final few features of the new marking tool on stream to match that of the legacy tool.

New Marking Tool: Performance Improvements

As the new marking tool is set to soon become the default marking tool it is important to make the tool as efficient as possible. With the May released we have improved the response times when loading the marking tool, loading new pages, switching between documents and browser tabs and refreshing pages.

Deprecation of the Legacy Marking Tool

A list of functionality that will no longer be supported by the new marking journey has been shared in a previous update.

We shall set the new marking journey (consisting of the marking tool and new flow page for assessors) as the default on all production licences with the May release (2 May - week 18). This will mean that the new marking journey will automatically be enabled on any flow that is created after this date. Flows that had been created prior to that date will remain unaffected by this change. 

The months following the May release will be a transition period where it will still be possible for managers to disable the new marking journey on a flow level. Should institutional processes require that all flows should still be automatically set up with the legacy marking tool, please get in touch with our Customer Support Team before the May release.

We can confirm that, the new marking journey will become the default on all flows from Friday 13 March (March 2026 release). It will not be possible for institutions to mark flows with the legacy tool after this date. All flows will be converted to use the new marking journey. We therefore strongly advise institutions to create plans to progress to the new marking journey in plenty of time before the March 2026 deadline.