With 61 Days Until the Exam, Your Students Need More Feedback

The 2026 HKDSE is approaching. Your students are writing practice essays. The question is whether they are getting enough feedback on those essays to actually improve before April.

If you are a teacher or tutor reading this, you already know the answer. You are marking as fast as you can, but there are only so many essays you can give detailed criterion-level feedback on in a week.

Your students need to write more. They need feedback faster. And they need it linked to the specific criteria that examiners use.

Why EssayHero Exists

I built EssayHero originally for my own students in Hong Kong. It started as a tool to give them practice feedback between my own marking rounds — something better than nothing while they waited for the next batch of corrected essays.

It has since grown, but the core purpose has not changed: faster feedback cycles for students who are practising.

What This Post Covers

This post explains exactly how the HKDSE assessment works, what the AI looks for, and where it falls short. If you are going to recommend it to your students, you deserve to know all of this.

The Three Criteria

Every HKDSE Paper 2 essay is assessed against three criteria, each scored on a scale of 1 to 7.

Content: Relevance and Task Fulfilment

Content evaluates relevance, detail, creativity, reader engagement, and fulfilment of task requirements.

At the top of the scale, the AI looks for writing that is relevant and extensive, shows awareness of purpose, engages the reader's interest, and demonstrates creativity and imagination where appropriate. At the lower end, it looks for whether the student has made at least a few relevant content points.

Language and Style: Accuracy and Sophistication

Language and Style covers sentence structures, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, and register appropriateness.

A score of 5 or above requires a wide range of sentence structures used accurately, with appropriate vocabulary that includes some ambitious and sophisticated language. The register, tone, and style must be appropriate to the text type. A score of 2 reflects simple sentences and basic vocabulary with sufficient accuracy to be comprehensible.

Organisation: Structure and Coherence

Organisation assesses structure coherence, paragraphing effectiveness, and cohesion between sentences and paragraphs.

Strong organisation means wholly coherent structure appropriate to the genre, effective paragraphing, and sophisticated cohesion. Weaker organisation shows basic paragraph awareness with simple links between sentences.

Total Score Range

The total is the sum of the three criterion scores, giving a range of 3 to 21.

How the 1-7 Scale Works

The official HKEAA Level Descriptors use a 1-5 framework. Our 1-7 scale extends this to provide more granularity at the top end.

Score Mapping to Official HKEAA Levels

This mapping means that a student scoring 5 on our system is producing work that aligns with the highest official HKEAA level descriptor. Scores of 6 and 7 are stretch targets — they indicate writing that goes beyond what the descriptors require, approaching native-speaker fluency and publishable quality.

Why We Extended the Scale

We made this design decision deliberately. The 1-5 official scale compresses strong performance into a single level.

Extending to 7 gives students at the top end more room to see improvement and gives teachers a more nuanced picture of where their strongest students stand.

Text Types Matter

HKDSE Paper 2 is distinctive because it requires students to write in specific text types. Each text type has its own conventions, and a student who writes a technically competent essay in the wrong genre will lose marks.

The Ten HKDSE Text Types

EssayHero assesses all official text types:

• Articles
• Blog entries
• Emails
• Formal letters
• Informal letters
• Proposals
• Reports
• Reviews
• Short stories
• Speeches

Genre-Specific Assessment

EssayHero applies genre-specific assessment criteria on top of the three core criteria.

For a speech, the AI checks for:

• Audience engagement techniques
• Oral markers ("Firstly," "Let me now turn to")
• Rhetorical techniques
• Memorable conclusion

For a formal letter, it checks for:

• Format conventions
• Formal register throughout
• Clear purpose statement

For a short story, it evaluates:

• Narrative arc
• Characterisation
• Dialogue quality
• Descriptive language

Calibration Against Official Standards

We have calibrated our scoring against HKEAA-graded exemplar essays using Google Gemini 3 Flash Preview. Our current Level QWK is 0.833 (almost perfect agreement) across 119 exemplar essays, with a within-one rate of 98.3% and near-zero bias (-0.08). For full results, see How We Validate Our Scores.

Our Calibration Process

Calibration is ongoing and involves multiple checks:

• Score distribution analysis — Ensuring the AI's score patterns match expected ranges
• Internal consistency checks — Verifying that criteria scores align logically
• Teacher feedback integration — Incorporating comparisons from educators who use both systems
• Pattern adjustment — Correcting tendencies toward over-generous or over-harsh marking

The Feedback Is Criterion-Linked

Every piece of feedback the AI produces names the specific criterion it relates to. Instead of generic comments like "good vocabulary," the student sees feedback tied to Language and Style, Content, or Organisation by name.

This trains students to think in the same terms that examiners use.

Adaptive Feedback Depth

The depth of feedback adapts to the student's score level:

This adaptive approach means a student who scores 2 on Organisation gets a fundamentally different feedback experience than one who scores 6. The struggling student gets scaffolding. The strong student gets validation and direction.

What We Cannot Do

This is the section that matters most, and I will be direct.

Cannot Replicate Holistic Examiner Judgement

Experienced HKDSE examiners develop a sense of quality that goes beyond individual criterion descriptors. They read thousands of essays and develop calibrated intuitions that an AI does not have.

Our AI applies criteria systematically and consistently, but it lacks the professional judgement that comes from years of marking experience.

Cannot Predict Exam Scores

If your student scores 16/21 on EssayHero, that does not mean they will score 16/21 in April.

The AI does not know:

• The specific question paper
• The marking team's calibration discussions
• The year's grade boundaries

Our scores are useful for tracking improvement over time, not as exam predictions.

Cannot Fully Assess Creative Writing

For short stories and other creative text types, the AI can evaluate structure, language, and technique. But the subjective appreciation of originality, emotional resonance, and creative risk-taking is inherently limited.

A human reader who is moved by a story will credit it in ways the AI cannot.

Cannot Assess Handwriting or Presentation

This is a digital tool. Handwriting quality, neatness, and physical presentation are outside scope.

Cannot Replace Your Feedback

You know your students. You know what they have been working on, where they were last month, and what specific weaknesses they need to address.

The AI provides standardised, criterion-based feedback. Your feedback provides context, relationship, and professional judgement.

What It Is Good For

After that list of limitations, the honest question is: what is the point?

More Practice Cycles

The point is more practice cycles. A student who writes a practice essay on Tuesday evening can paste it into EssayHero, get paragraph-by-paragraph feedback linked to Content, Language and Style, and Organisation, identify the weakest areas, revise, and bring a better draft to class on Wednesday.

That revision cycle is where learning happens, and most students do not get enough of it because feedback is scarce.

Text-Type-Specific Guidance

The text-type-specific feedback helps students understand genre conventions. Many students lose marks not because their English is weak but because they do not understand what makes a good speech different from a good article.

The genre-specific criteria make these distinctions explicit.

Pinpoint Weaknesses

The paragraph-by-paragraph format means students can identify exactly where their essay weakens. Not just "your organisation could be better" but "paragraph three lacks a clear topic sentence, and the transition from paragraph two is abrupt."

Full Transparency

The complete assessment criteria, level descriptors, text-type-specific criteria, and the full prompt text that the AI receives are published on the HKDSE methodology page. Every section of the prompt is available for inspection.

EssayHero is open source under AGPL-3.0.

Independence from HKEAA

The assessment criteria used in our prompts are our interpretation and operationalisation of the HKDSE marking standards. They are not a reproduction of HKEAA's proprietary marking schemes.

Privacy and Data Handling

Essays are processed and discarded. They are not stored (unless the student opts in by creating an account), not used for model training, and not accessible to anyone after the feedback is generated.

Try It With Your Students

EssayHero is free. No account required.

How to Test It

If you want to see what the feedback looks like on an HKDSE Paper 2 essay:

1. Go to essayhero.app/?exam=hkdse-paper2-partb
2. Paste a sample essay
3. Read the output

The "Try a Sample" button will load a demo essay if you want a quick look.

Share Your Feedback

If you think the feedback could help your students practise more effectively between assignments, share it with them. If you think the criteria do not align with HKEAA standards, or the feedback is not useful, I would genuinely like to hear why.

Email hello@essayhero.app.

The Value Proposition

With 61 days to go, every practice essay that gets meaningful feedback is an opportunity for improvement.

EssayHero does not replace your marking. But it might mean your students arrive at your desk with drafts that have already addressed the structural and language weaknesses they could have caught themselves.

EssayHero is free, has no commercial aims, and is built by a Hong Kong teacher for Hong Kong students. Questions or feedback? Email hello@essayhero.app.