Examiner Mode — sentence-by-sentence marking with AO breakdown

The hardest part of revising for essay subjects isn't writing the essay. It's knowing whether the essay you just wrote would actually pick up the marks. Generic AI feedback ("good use of evidence!") doesn't help. What you need is somebody to read your answer, mark it the way an examiner would, and tell you which sentences earned marks, which ones didn't, and what would lift you to the next grade.

That's what Examiner Mode does. It lives at the bottom of every lesson on LearningBro, alongside the AI Tutor chat. Paste in a question and your answer, set the maximum marks, and the AI plays examiner.

What you get back

Examiner Mode returns a structured marking sheet, not a paragraph of vague feedback:

• Sentence-by-sentence commentary. Every sentence you wrote is shown back to you with the marks it picked up, the marks it missed, and a short examiner-voice note on why. You can see exactly where you earned credit and exactly where you didn't.
• AO breakdown. Most exam papers split marks across Assessment Objectives — for example AQA A-Level English Literature uses AO1 (knowledge), AO2 (analysis of methods), AO3 (context), AO4 (connections), AO5 (alternative interpretations). Examiner Mode shows what you scored on each AO out of the maximum, with a one-line note on what's missing on each.
• Grade band — current and next. It tells you the band your answer is sitting in (Lower-middle, Upper-middle, etc.), names the band above, and tells you how many extra marks you need to climb. No vague "could be better" — a number.
• Missing phrases. A short list of moves your answer didn't make — things like "evaluate the limitations of the methodology" or "link back to the question stem in the conclusion". These are the concrete actions you can take on the next attempt.
• Examiner narration. A prose summary of how an examiner would think through your answer — written in the second person, like a tutor talking you through their marks. Toggle the speaker icon and it gets read aloud, so you can hear an examiner thinking through your writing rather than just reading their notes.

How it pairs with voice mode

Voice mode landed last week on the AI Tutor chat — and it works in Examiner Mode too. When the marking sheet comes back, you can tap Read examiner narration to have it spoken aloud. Two minutes of an examiner walking you through your own answer, in your ears, after every practice essay. That's a feedback loop most students never get from a teacher because there isn't time in a school week to mark every essay every student writes.

How it differs from a generic AI essay marker

A few things make Examiner Mode different from "paste your essay into ChatGPT":

• Exam-board rubrics. Examiner Mode pulls from the AO weightings actually used by AQA, Edexcel, and OCR for the subject and level you're studying — not a generic "good writing" rubric. The marks awarded match the marks an examiner could reasonably award on a real paper.
• Sentence-level granularity. ChatGPT will tell you the essay is "well-structured". Examiner Mode tells you sentence three earned an AO2 mark for analysing the verb choice, sentence four didn't earn anything, and sentence seven would have earned an AO3 mark if you'd named the historical context.
• It refuses to write your essay. You paste a question and your answer. Examiner Mode marks what you wrote. It will not write a model essay for you. If you don't have an answer to paste, the AI Tutor chat will help you plan one, but it won't hand you the finished writing.
• It runs on Claude Sonnet, not Haiku. Marking essays needs the more capable model — sentence-level scoring on a real rubric is harder than tutoring chat. We use Sonnet for Examiner Mode and AI essay marking; Haiku powers the cheap, fast tutor chat. You pay for both inside the same subscription; we cover the model cost.

Where to try it

Examiner Mode is a paid feature — it sits behind the same £9/month subscription that unlocks the rest of the platform. Trial users see an upgrade prompt; subscribers see the full marking sheet.

Open any lesson with essay-style questions and scroll to the Examiner Mode panel below the chat. A few useful starting points:

• Edexcel A-Level Chemistry: Bonding — try a 6-mark "explain the trend in melting points" question
• Edexcel A-Level Physics: Mechanics — try a long-form derivation question
• A-Level English Literature courses across set texts — particularly suited to long-form analytical essays
• A-Level History courses — Examiner Mode handles 25-mark "How far do you agree…" essays with full AO breakdown

What's coming next

We're working on a few extensions:

• Past-paper rubric pinning. Today the AO weighting is inferred from your subject and level. Soon you'll be able to point Examiner Mode at a specific paper template (e.g. "AQA A-Level English Literature Paper 2 Section A 25-mark essay") and the marks awarded will follow that specific rubric exactly.
• Per-paragraph rewrite suggestions. Where Examiner Mode flags a missing AO mark, we'll add an optional "show me how to rewrite this paragraph to pick up that mark" — exemplar-style, not a finished essay you can copy in.
• History of your essays. A timeline of every essay Examiner Mode has marked, so you can see which AOs you reliably earn and which you keep missing across topics.

If you're a school evaluating AI tutoring tools, Examiner Mode plus the AI Tutor chat plus voice mode is a stack no other platform offers at our school price (£3 per student per year). Email us at hello@learningbro.com for a school demo or trial.