Rachel places new students by conversation, not by multiple-choice test. She delivers a complete CEFR profile and full needs analysis to your teachers — before the student walks into class on day one.
Arriving Monday · Group English Programme · 4 weeks
Student is preparing for a job interview in English. Prioritise business vocabulary, formal register, and speaking confidence. Avoid heavy grammar drilling in early sessions.
Traditional placement tests are blunt instruments. A multiple-choice grammar test gives you a score. It does not tell you why a student is at that level, what they need from their time at your school, what contexts they find difficult, or what their English actually needs to do for them in the real world.
A student who scores B1 because they have strong reading but poor speaking needs a completely different programme from a student who scores B1 because their grammar is shaky but their fluency is high. The test cannot see the difference. Rachel can.
Multiple choice. Fixed questions. Returns a score. Takes no account of communication goals, learning history, or what the student actually needs English for.
Adaptive, natural conversation. Returns a full CEFR profile, a skill-by-skill breakdown, a needs analysis, and specific recommendations for the teacher — all before day one.
Rachel guides each student through a structured but natural multi-phase assessment. Every question adapts in real time to what the student produces. The student experiences a conversation. Rachel builds a picture.
Rachel opens with natural comprehension tasks and targeted grammar questions drawn from a bank of validated assessment items. Questions adapt in difficulty based on each response — harder if the student is performing well, more supportive if they are struggling. There is no fixed test order.
Structured written tasks that reveal grammatical accuracy, understanding of syntax, and the ability to communicate a meaning in different forms. Rachel evaluates these responses using the school's own academic standards — not a generic rubric.
Rachel asks open questions about the student's background, their reasons for learning English, their work or study context, and what they want to achieve. This is where the needs analysis happens — not as a separate form, but as a natural part of the conversation.
Rachel probes gently: if a student says they are preparing for a job interview, she asks follow-up questions to understand the industry, the level of formality required, and specific gaps they are aware of.
A short written production task — topic chosen to be relevant to the student's stated context — that allows Rachel to assess writing accuracy, vocabulary range, and text organisation at the upper end of the CEFR scale.
Students who opt in complete a short 40-second speaking task using their device microphone. Rachel's speech recognition layer transcribes and analyses the recording — assessing fluency, pronunciation, and spoken grammar. The audio is transcribed, emailed to the Director of Studies, and then permanently deleted.
Rachel's assessment generates a full placement report sent automatically to the Director of Studies. The teacher arrives knowing the student — not meeting them cold.
Overall placement level and a confidence percentage based on the consistency of responses across all phases.
Separate assessments of grammar accuracy, vocabulary range, writing quality, and (if opted in) speaking — plotted individually, not averaged into a single misleading score.
What this student needs English for, what contexts matter most to them, what their own stated goals are, and any specific challenges they identified themselves.
Specific, actionable suggestions for the teacher — which areas to prioritise, which to avoid dwelling on, and any student-specific notes from the conversation.
The report feeds directly into CLARA — the school's lesson planning engine. The student's needs analysis shapes their classroom's lesson plans from day one.
Rachel is not a replacement for academic judgement. It is a tool that gives your academic team more and better information to exercise that judgement on.
Rachel brings the entire placement process in-house. No third-party test platform. No external data sharing. No licence fee to a testing company. Everything runs on your own NVIDIA hardware, on your premises.
Rachel can handle one student arriving or fifty arriving the same week. The assessment runs asynchronously — students complete it at their own pace, in their own time, before they even arrive at school.
Because Rachel's output is structured data — not a PDF — it connects directly to CLARA, the school's lesson planning engine. The student's needs analysis shapes their classroom experience from day one without any manual transfer.
Rachel's recommendation is a starting point. The DOS or academic manager can always override a placement decision. Rachel provides better information — the human decision remains with the school.
Rachel's assessments produce structured, auditable records suitable for inspection by accreditation bodies including QQI, Equals, and the British Council. Every assessment is logged and retained.
Rachel is a module within the Stella school operating system. It integrates with Marya (enrolment), CLARA (lesson planning), and the communication platform — or can be adopted as a standalone tool.
Every Rachel assessment is processed on your school's own NVIDIA hardware. No student data is transmitted to external AI providers — ever.
Rachel runs on dedicated NVIDIA hardware at your school. Assessment data never leaves your infrastructure.
If a student opts into speaking assessment, the audio is transcribed and then permanently deleted. Only the transcription is retained.
Compliance is engineered in. Data cannot leave your infrastructure because there is no mechanism to send it anywhere.
Speaking assessment is explicitly opt-in. Rachel explains what happens to the audio before the student decides.
Rachel uses open-weight European-origin AI models. No US hyperscaler dependency. No data crossing jurisdictions.
Every assessment is logged in auditable format, compatible with inspection requirements of QQI, Equals, and the British Council.
Request a live demonstration or get in touch to discuss integrating Rachel into your school's placement process.