The student who slipped for three months and nobody noticed

A board-exam shock is never sudden. The line was falling for weeks — in a register nobody read as a line.

Every institute has this story. A decent student, regular attendance, no complaints. Then the board result arrives and the parent is on the phone asking how nobody saw it coming.

The register hides the trend

Marks live in a column per test. Human eyes read columns as a list, not as a slope. A drop from 38 to 34 to 30 to 27 looks like four ordinary numbers. Plotted, it is a warning.

Compare to the student, not the class

A student scoring 27/50 in a strong batch may be doing fine for them. A student who used to score 42 and now scores 34 is in trouble even though they're above average. The only fair baseline is the student's own first two months.

Three consecutive tests below their own baseline. That's the rule. It's simple enough to run by hand, and too tedious for anyone to actually do.

Make the flag do something

A flag nobody acts on is just another column. The flag should land with the teacher the same day, in the owner's evening brief, and assign a mentor in one tap. Then it should clear itself when the line turns back up — so the student sees the recovery, too.

Drishtaa runs this on every test entered, for every student, and shows the parent the same growth line the teacher sees.