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

As we approach the end of the year, we would like to provide an update on the progress of the New Marking Tool ahead of its planned deprecation in March 2026. Significant enhancements have been made over the summer, and further functionality is scheduled for upcoming releases. Below is an overview of recently completed and ongoing developments since our last update in March. 

Participant-Level Scores and Responses via Statistics Page

Assessors will be able to obtain the individual scores awarded to each participant for every question, as well as download the complete responses submitted by each participant for each question. This added transparency, introduced in direct response to user feedback, is intended to facilitate more insightful and constructive feedback and support our customers in their various marking journeys.

Please note that certain statistical functions available in the legacy marking tool will not be carried over to the new statistics module. We have done a careful review to determine which features will be retained in the New Marking Tool, and are actively investigating how high-demand capabilities—such as item analysis—might be integrated into WISEflow in the future. Our API also enables institutions to access essential data for constructing their own statistical analyses outside of WISEflow.

Planned for release in January 2026

Custom Marking on Auto-scored Questions

Introducing the ability to apply custom marking to auto-scored questions enables assessors to exercise greater flexibility within the marking tool.

Assessors will have the ability to override an automatically generated score on auto-scored questions with a custom score, provided they have been assigned the relevant permissions. This enhancement within the new marking tool brings greater flexibility to the marking process, allowing assessors to amend auto-scores for individual participants without the need for a full rescore, while maintaining clearly defined controls. Adjustments can be made within the pre-set minimum and maximum score range for each question, mirroring some of the adaptable functionality previously available in the legacy tool but with improved safeguards.

Scheduled for release in December 2025

Other Improvements

Improvements to the Scoring Engine on FLOWmultis

With the October release 2025, the new marking tool has been given a significant backend enhancement while maintaining a familiar outward-facing experience. This update integrates a faster and more reliable scoring engine into FLOWmulti, ensuring a smoother experience for assessors. Crucially, it eliminates all mismatching score issues by enforcing a single point of truth for all scoring data. Scores for individual questions will only appear in the new marking tool once they have been successfully persisted in the scoring engine, and all item- and activity-level totals will reflect only what is currently stored. This ensures consistency, accuracy, and transparency across the entire scoring process.

Released in October 2025

Smaller Improvements

  • To promote greater efficiency and streamline the assessor workflow, grade justifications will be accessible from a sidebar. (Planned for release in March 2026)
  • Assessors will have the option to select all of their annotations at once, significantly reducing repetitive tasks such as individually updating the sharing status for each annotation. (Planned for release in January 2026)
  • Grades determined using a rubric will appear directly within the grade section, rather than during the rubric completion process. This change is intended to support transparency during the grading workflow. (Planned for release in March 2026)
  • Assessors can view the word count for highlighted text within participant submissions. This feature is particularly valuable when specific word limits are in place, specifically for FLOWlock or FLOWassign submissions, enabling easier monitoring of compliance with assessment criteria. (Scheduled for release in December 2026)

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.

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.

Discontinuation of Sentiment Analysis and Introduction of AI Feedback Theme

Uptake of sentiment analysis has been minimal, so this feature will not be incorporated into the new marking tool and will be removed with the deprecation of the legacy marking tool in March 2026. Instead, we are focusing our efforts on a new AI-driven theme, initially centred around generating grade justifications. We are also exploring the potential to extend this functionality to encompass broader feedback in the future. Updates on the progression of this theme will be communicated via SYCAmore.