Amanveer Singh Co-founder at SchoolPad

In my eight years with SchoolPad, I have had the opportunity to work closely with hundreds of reputed schools across India in managing their report cards and results. From setting up examination structures for different grades and boards to making entries of marks and generating report cards, it has been an exciting journey full of new learnings.

Over the years, this valuable experience has helped our SchoolPad team to develop its examination platform and take it to the next level. Today, we are easily managing to generate thousands of report cards every year of our over 200 school partners. It’s noteworthy that SchoolPad is not merely a software platform but an entire set of systems and processes designed to empower teachers to streamline examination processes and enable timely results generation and report cards delivery with the least errors.

In this article, I have consolidated all these learnings into 3 simple steps, which, if followed consciously, will help boost the entire experience.

1.Pre-Planning: This is by far the most crucial step that will help lay the foundation for delivering timely and error-free results to parents. Before the commencement of every examination, hold a quick meeting with all the coordinators and members of your examination cell while also making notes of: When do teachers start checking the papers? By when should marks be entered into the software or Excel file? When will the analysis be conducted? When will teachers check the soft copies of the results? When will they be shared with parents? Circulating this data among teachers will keep everyone on track, thus minimising delays. Our teams force this process by sharing a report card sample with schools and filling it with dummy marks a week or two in advance. This simulates the entire process and gets the thought processes running so the changes and the plan are in place, well in time.

2.Monitoring: Once teachers begin their evaluation process, a practice that we have implemented in schools is keeping a continuous check on the marks-entry process which ensures that teachers are filling in the marks and associated details like attendance, remarks, etc., in a timely manner and as per plan. Even if you don’t have a system to help you with such reports, you can assign the task to your coordinators who can continuously follow up with their teachers and keep ticking the checklist of their classes and subjects, as and when they get a confirmation from their teachers. The importance of this step is to ensure that the responsibilities to monitor the marks-entry process are clearly defined to achieve the desired results.

3.Pre-Checking: Once the coordinators and teachers are aligned with the plan and complete their marks-entry process in time, you are left with one final step to ensure that your efforts don’t go waste and you ultimately achieve the goal of generating and delivering results and report cards on time and with least errors. This step has emerged as one of the most powerful steps especially during the Covid-19 pandemic where teachers only had the option to collaborate online or on the phone. Just a day before the parent-teacher meeting, try to arrange soft copies of the report cards and share them with the teachers (ideally class teachers and co-class teachers) so they can run through the report cards. This step ensures that even if there’s a minor error, it can be fixed before the results are handed over to parents, avoiding any lastminute chaos or arguments with parents on PTM day.

Following the above three steps will make your entire examination process more organised and systematic, which will in turn enhance the quality and experience of the result delivery for parents. If you have been struggling with your examination process or would like to share feedback about some of the best practices you’ve been following, feel free to write to me at amanaveer@schoolpad. in. I would love to get in touch.

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