Who I am
I'm Harry. I've taught Selective and OC preparation in Sydney for ten years. In that time I've marked hundreds of practice writing pieces, most of them by Year 5 and 6 students, against the Department's published criteria.
Writing was always the section families found hardest to prepare for. Reading and maths have answer keys. Writing has a rubric most people have never read, no published word count, and a handful of sample answers. Parents would ask me what a Band 5 actually looked like and I'd end up drawing it on the back of a worksheet.
The same problems came up every year. Pieces that ran out of time. Feelings named instead of shown. The same sentence shape forty times in a row. Those are habits, and habits change with practice and specific feedback, not with another worksheet about adjectives.
Why I built this
Three things I wanted for my own students and couldn't find:
- Prompts in the test's format, with a stimulus and a task, not “write a story about a dog”.
- A typing box that behaves like the test. No spell-check, no autocorrect, a clock.
- Marks in the examiners' own language, so a student learns what “chosen for effect” means by seeing it said about their own paragraph.
So I built it. It's free and there's no account, because what helped my students most was writing one piece a week and reading honest feedback on it, and I didn't want anything standing in the way of that.
How the marking works, and what it is
The marking is done by an AI model. I want to be plain about that, because a lot of parents are rightly wary of a computer telling their child how good their writing is, and I was too.
Here is what I did about it:
- It marks from the Department's published criteria, band by band, the same document I used in class. Every mark has to be tied to a descriptor from the rubric, not to a general impression.
- It is told who the writers are: eleven and twelve year olds, typing for thirty minutes, no spell-check. A Band 6 is a distinctive piece for a strong Year 6 student, not for an adult.
- I wrote its instructions from my own notes on what separates a Band 4 from a Band 6, and I check it against pieces I've marked myself. When we disagree, I adjust it.
- It is an estimate, not an official result. Nobody can tell you what a piece would score on the day. What it can do is show which band each habit is pulling a piece towards, and that is the thing practice actually needs.
If a mark looks wrong to you, email me the piece and I'll tell you what I think. That's also how the marker gets better.
What happens to your child's writing
- Drafts and finished pieces are saved in your browser, not on our servers.
- When you press Mark, the piece is sent for marking and the result comes back. We don't keep a copy.
- If you email the report to yourself, it goes to the address you type and nowhere else.
- Nothing your child writes is used to train AI.
- We count visits and how many pieces get marked, using cookieless analytics. Those counts include the word count and the mark, never the writing or an email address.
What's next
Writing first, because that's where the help was thinnest. The same approach, test-format practice with honest feedback, will follow for the other sections of the Selective test and for the OC test, under the Spark Prep name.
Get in touch
hello@sparkprep.com.au. I read everything. If something on this site is wrong, tell me and I'll fix it.