Jisc's National AI in Marking and Feedback Pilot — 38 UK Colleges and Universities

Jisc's National Centre for AI in Tertiary Education ran a year-long pilot, from September 2025 to August 2026, testing whether AI-powered marking and feedback tools could meaningfully reduce assessment workload without compromising academic integrity. The pilot had two strands: three purpose-built education tools (Graide, Keath and TeacherMatic) and general-purpose assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, evaluated across 38 UK colleges and universities (an early cohort of 14 colleges and 21 universities, later reported as 38 institutions overall).

Interim and closing findings, published by Jisc in December 2025 and May 2026, were deliberately measured rather than promotional. Formative, low-stakes assessment emerged as the lowest-risk and most effective use case; maintaining genuine human oversight proved harder than expected, with parallel marking (AI and teacher marking side by side) identified as the most workable mitigation. Student reactions were mixed, with real concerns raised about trust, ethics and automation, which led participating institutions to co-develop a shared student-communication pack and exchange ethics-approval templates.

Jisc's own framing is cautionary: 'AI should not be used as a catch-all' and institutions should build an evidence-based rationale before adopting these tools, maintaining academic integrity throughout. At least one participant, Ayrshire College, reported a marked increase in its own use of TeacherMatic after the pilot, but Jisc has not published quantified learning-outcome or workload-hours data, and the sector-wide evaluation stops short of claiming proven impact — a genuinely evidence-first, still-early-stage case rather than a scaled success story.

Read the full analysis: https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2026/05/20/insights-from-the-ai-in-marking-and-feedback-pilot/