Newsletter May 2026
There has never been a more uncertain time in education. There has never been a more exciting time to be in education.
Blog
Featured articles
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⏱️RM Compare | NOW is in BETA
We’re pleased to announce that ⏱️RM Compare | NOW is now in BETA. It is a lightweight RM Compare experience designed for quick judgements, allowing users to capture or upload an item, compare it to a ready-made standard, and review a score in just a few steps.
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Time for Tea? Can AI spot a nice cuppa?
Just like everyone else in the UK we are getting very excited about National Tea Day which takes place on the 21st April. The day is a great opportunity to share tea brewing preferences, and the strength of the perfect 'cuppa' is always hotly debated. So we though it would be interesting to get the view of AI.
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Back to the Future: Rethinking Assessment in a World of Uncertainty
In 1792, revolutionaries in Paris abolished a king, Americans calmly re‑elected a president, and Cambridge quietly invented something that still shapes millions of lives every year: exam marking. While politics and industry were being rebuilt in public, assessment was being rebuilt on paper. Two centuries later, we are still living inside that decision – and only now starting to see its limits.
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Newsletter May 2026
There has never been a more uncertain time in education. There has never been a more exciting time to be in education.
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Existing customer announcement
RM Assessment, who provides RM Compare, is moving to a new legal entity from 1 June 2026.
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Lessons from Software Engineering: Why AI in Assessment May Be Solving the Wrong Problem
Every few years, a body of evidence emerges from an unexpected direction that turns out to be exactly what education needed to hear. We think this might be one of those moments.
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Is your software high quality, how do you know – and does it matter?
When important decisions, results or reputations depend on a piece of software, “quality” stops being a nice‑to‑have. It becomes the question of whether that system will be there when people need it, and whether it can adapt as your needs change.
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AI Assessment has a dignity problem - here's how to fix it
AI assessment has a dignity problem. Not a technology problem, or even just a fairness problem, but a problem with how it treats people at precisely the moments they are most exposed and most human.
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From Steady State to Rulers: how RM Compare is building the future of shared standards
Assessment systems often talk about standards, but too often those standards remain abstract. Teachers, examiners and assessors are expected to align to a wider benchmark, yet in day-to-day practice they usually see only the work directly in front of them: their own class, their own cohort, their own centre. That gap matters.
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⏱️RM Compare | NOW is in BETA
We’re pleased to announce that ⏱️RM Compare | NOW is now in BETA. It is a lightweight RM Compare experience designed for quick judgements, allowing users to capture or upload an item, compare it to a ready-made standard, and review a score in just a few steps.
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Gradually then suddenly (Part 4 / 4)
If the first post in this series traced the industrial birth of marking, the second described the temptation to use AI as a faster horse, and the third argued for rediscovering human judgement, this final post asks the practical question: what would assessment look like if it were designed for the world now emerging rather than the one that produced marks and grades?
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Rediscovering Human Judgement in an Age of AI (Part 3 / 4)
If the first post argued that marking is a child of the Industrial Revolution, and the second showed how AI is mostly being used to build faster horses, this third post is about something older and more fundamental: human judgement itself.