“What the Common Core does for ed tech companies,” said Shayne Miel, a vice president of software development at an education start-up called LightSide Labs, “is provide a common target. It’s been a huge boon for us, and that’s because it has allowed us to work to standards that are meant for everyone in the country, rather than state-by-state.” National uniformity, in other words, represents an opportunity for a company to expand its market.

Miel’s company makes a piece of software called Revision Assistant, whose purpose is to provide a reasonable facsimile of a compassionate editor and help students learn about the stages of the writing process. According to Miel, the Common Core has done two things for the team members at LightSide (at least one of whom must be a Star Wars fan). First, it has provided a wealth of already-graded student essays from which they can extract statistical data—including word frequencies, essay lengths, and other similarly superficial things—to build models of what “better” and “worse” writing looks like.

Second, it has provided clear rubrics from which the software can generate automated feedback. In writing, for example, the Common Core’s anchor standards ask that students provide evidence for their claims, express their ideas in clear language, and employ a varied vocabulary. “Our model,” Miel said, “highlights portions of the text that it thinks are high-scoring or low-scoring on one or more of the rubrics, and then associates an appropriate comment with it. The comments are drawn from a database of comments generated by education professionals.”

If your brow is currently furrowing with skepticism at the idea of a computer scoring essays, that’s understandable. It’s worth nothing, however, that—at least in the eyes of its makers—Revision Assistant isn’t meant to substitute for feedback from a corporeal teacher. Rather, it’s intended to help ease student jitters about the dismal process of being graded by allowing them to work with the program on their own, perfecting their fledgling drafts before turning them in and being scolded over comma splices. It can be used in class or at home. Generously understood, it offers the kind of individualized feedback and intellectual nurturance that large classrooms so often strain to provide. It just so happens to be a computer algorithm. (For the record, this article was written without the aid of Revision Assistant.)

It’s not just start-ups that are getting involved. The titans of the education industry—companies like Pearson and Scholastic and McGraw Hill—are rolling out a series of “digital curriculum” updates aligned with the Common Core standards. Witness, for instance, McGraw Hill’s partnership with StudySync, a company whose software suite incorporates digital libraries of famous literary works, along with Common Core-aligned assessments on them and (creepy, Brave New World-ish) videos designed to model what “good” literary discussion looks like.