The corrected essay is not yours

Paste a band 5.5 essay into most checkers and you get a band 7 essay back. It feels like progress. It is not: the improvement belongs to the tool, and the tool does not sit the exam with you. On test day you write the same band 5.5 sentences, because nothing about how you write has changed.

The rewrite is also the easiest feature to build, which is why everyone has one. Asking a model to improve a paragraph takes a single instruction. Getting a person to improve their own paragraph takes a product.

What we do instead

We name at most three problems, quote the sentence each one lives in, explain why it costs marks against the official criteria, and ask you a question you can only answer by rewriting it yourself.

Three, not thirty. Nobody fixes thirty things. Almost everybody can fix three, and doing so is the only mechanism by which a Writing band actually moves.

Then, when you submit the next draft, we compare it with the last one and tell you which of those problems you genuinely resolved — not by asking a model again, but by checking whether the flagged sentences are still there.

We will also tell you when we are guessing

We give a band range, not a single number. Every tool that prints one exact figure is claiming a precision that does not exist; their own users say so in public, comparing scores that differ by a full band between tools on the same essay.

Where our estimate comes from too little evidence, we show no number at all rather than inventing one.

What this costs you

More effort, and a slower first impression. You will not leave your first visit holding a polished essay. You will leave knowing three specific things about how you write, which is worth more in eight weeks and nothing at all in eight seconds.

If what you want is a corrected document, there are good tools for that and we are not one of them.