The marking problem with HKDSE Chinese writing

Marking a Paper 2 essay spends time in three places: judging the level against the itemised scheme, pointing out specific problems in content and structure, and writing comments tailored to that piece. The same faults recur across a class, such as drifting off the question, weak argument and paragraphs that do not connect, and a teacher often writes the same comment for the thirtieth time. One round of marking is near the limit, so a student's essay usually gets one round of feedback and there is little chance to polish the same piece again and again.

The AI for Empowering Learning and Teaching Funding Programme asks schools to bring AI-assisted teaching into at least three subjects, and Chinese writing is a common starting point, because the marking load is heavy and the improvement is easy to write into a report. The condition is that the tool genuinely fits Hong Kong's marking culture.

How Chinese AI marking supports Paper 2 essays

Item-by-item marking against the official scheme

The reliable approach is a system with the HKDSE Chinese itemised marking scheme built in, giving a first grade for each area such as content, structure and expression rather than spitting out a single total. The teacher moves from marking from scratch to reviewing and correcting, looking at the system's item-by-item judgement first and then deciding whether to agree.

Every mark backed by the candidate's own words

Every mark should point back to a specific place in the candidate's essay, so the teacher can see at a glance why the system judged it that way. A mark with no supporting text cannot be reviewed and cannot be explained to the student. With item-by-item evidence, the teacher's review becomes a quick confirmation rather than a full re-mark.

A feedback loop that supports multiple drafts

Students revise on the feedback and resubmit, the system gives a fresh first mark on the revised draft, and the teacher only handles the parts still in doubt. The marking cost does not rise in line with the number of drafts, so several drafts with several rounds of feedback becomes workable at the scale of a class. Writing ability builds through repeated revision, and this loop is exactly the part that Chinese writing teaching most lacks.

What to check when choosing a Chinese AI marking tool

  • Which marking scheme is built in: is it the HKDSE Chinese itemised scheme, calibrated against past papers, rather than a generic writing score?
  • Whether item-by-item marks come with the source text: run a few essays through and check that each mark points back to a specific sentence in the piece.
  • Whether adjusting a mark is easy for the teacher: reviewing and changing should take a few steps, and it should keep a record of changes for the report and for professional accountability.
  • Whether the Chinese language processing is reliable: test its handling of Traditional Chinese, formal written Chinese and Classical Chinese quotations on local essay samples.
  • How student essays are handled: where they are stored, how long they are kept and whether they are used to train models, all in line with the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance.

The real limits of AI marking in Chinese

Some things cannot be handed to AI, and should not be. The depth of an essay's idea, the cadence of the language, the clever touch that plays around the theme without stating it: these literary judgements still rest with the teacher. AI suits the high-volume, repetitive first pass, while the teacher handles the judgement of quality and knows the individual student. The system sees this one script; the teacher sees a year of this student's progress.

High-stakes assessment holds this line all the more firmly. The final grade in internal exams and banding assessments must be the teacher's to decide. The right division of labour is AI for the volume, teachers for the quality, and we build our tool on that premise: lay out the evidence for every mark so the teacher's final decision is both quick and confident.