Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by hand before publishing - see our AI transparency page for how we use AI across the app.
Marking a class spelling test is the same every week: read the words out, collect thirty sheets, and then spend your evening ticking and crossing each one by hand before you can even start thinking about what to teach next. We've built a way to skip the marking part without changing anything about how the test itself is run - and after a small first trial, we're opening it up as a beta, looking for a handful more schools and tuition centres to pilot it with us.
What it does
If you already use Spelling.Live's class tools to assign a list to a group, each assignment now has two extra buttons:
- Print test sheets - one personalised A4 sheet per pupil, name already on it, numbered lines for up to 15 words, and a small QR code in the corner that identifies who it belongs to. Nothing to write on afterwards.
- Upload scanned tests - after the class has written the test on paper the normal way, scan the whole pile through the photocopier as one PDF file and upload it in one go. Each page's QR code matches it to the right pupil automatically; anything the scanner can't quite read gets a quick dropdown so you can assign it by hand in seconds.
From there, AI reads what each pupil wrote against the words you dictated and marks it - you get a card per pupil with anything correct tucked away and anything wrong or uncertain sitting right there to check or fix. One tap saves the whole class's results, which then feed into each pupil's own progress report exactly like any other real test.
The step that used to take an evening now takes the time it takes to scan a pile of paper.
Full walkthrough, including what it costs and how it differs from our existing Dictation test and Paper practice flows, is in the Teachers & Classes help guide.
Why it's a beta
We built this off the back of one thing we kept hearing from tutors and teachers: the app is good at practice, but the "test day" itself was still entirely manual. So we built the QR-sheet-and-scan flow and ran it quietly with a small number of classes first, rather than switching it on for everyone at once. That trial told us the core idea works - the QR matching is reliable, the marking is accurate enough to genuinely save time, and the review screen catches the handful of cases the AI gets wrong. It also told us there's more to learn: different school photocopiers, different handwriting styles across year groups, different class sizes, different ways teachers actually want to fit "test day" into their week.
So it's live in the app today, clearly marked Beta, rather than being held back until it's "finished" - because the fastest way to finish it properly is with more real classes using it in more real conditions, not more guessing on our end.
We're looking for a few pilot schools and tuition centres
If you run spelling tests for a class or group - a school class, a tuition centre group, a small after-school club - and you'd be willing to try this for a few weeks and tell us honestly what worked and what didn't, we'd like to hear from you. In return:
- You get early access to the feature, ahead of a wider rollout, at no extra cost.
- Teacher and tutor accounts already come with a raised 500 AI credits a month allowance (see claiming free tutor access), which comfortably covers marking a class's worth of sheets each week.
- A direct line to us - your feedback shapes what changes before this leaves beta, not the other way round.
Getting started only takes a class already set up with pupils and a list assigned - the Teachers & Classes guide covers that in a few minutes if you're new to the class tools.
Interested in piloting it? Email us at support@spelling.live with a line about your school or tuition centre and roughly how many pupils you'd be testing - we'll get back to you personally, not an autoresponder.