From marklist to report card without a calculator

Every Ethiopian school has a grading policy: what weight the mid-exam carries, where an A begins, how ties in rank are handled, what the pass mark is. In most schools that policy lives in the head of one records officer and a fragile Excel sheet. Temari asks the school to state the policy once: grading scales, letter bands, rounding rules, and the continuous assessment plan per subject and semester.

From then on the policy executes itself. Teachers enter raw scores; the system applies weights, computes totals and averages, assigns letters from the school's own bands, and ranks the section. Change nothing mid-term and every sheet is consistent; the policy is versioned with the term, so last year's report cards keep last year's rules.

The continuous assessment plan is also a completeness guarantee: because the marklist is generated from the plan, a forgotten assessment column is impossible, and a teacher can see at a glance which slots still have empty cells well before the deadline, instead of at 11pm on the night grades are due.

Marks are the most contested numbers in a school, so the workflow encodes who may touch them. While a marklist is in a teacher's hands, only that teacher writes score cells. A supervisor who must enter marks, because a teacher is sick or a vacancy is unfilled, first declares on-behalf entry with a reason; the teacher is notified, and every cell entered that way is badged with who recorded it.

Approval is four-eyes by construction: whoever typed cells, declared assistance, or submitted the sheet cannot be the one who countersigns it. A signed marklist locks; a closed term locks everything, centrally, for everyone including administrators. "Someone changed my marks" is the accusation that poisons staff rooms, and here it stops being possible to make, because the record shows exactly who did what and when.

None of this slows the honest path: for a teacher entering their own class's scores on time, the grid is keyboard-first, autosaving, and faster than the paper book it replaces.

When a semester closes, Temari computes each student's final average, section rank and letter grades, then freezes them as the term's permanent record. Report cards, transcripts, government rosters and next year's promotion decisions all read this frozen record, never the live working data, which is why a document printed in Sene matches one printed three years later.

The frozen results feed analysis while they are fresh: mark distributions per subject and section expose the exam that was too hard or the class that is drifting, and roster reports rank whole grades for the staff meeting. Promotion suggestions are computed from the same numbers, then decided by humans. The board records promote or repeat per student, and the system executes those decisions into next year.

Attendance joins the card automatically: absence days per term are counted from the register per student, so the report card's conduct block fills itself from records that already exist.