Results and reports

Academics shows how your child is doing: results by exam and subject, the report card, and the trend over time.

Results appear here after the school releases an exam; this capture has none yet.

Results

Results appear once the school releases them. Marks are entered by teachers, checked, and published deliberately — so a gap between an exam and its results is normal and does not mean anything has gone wrong.

For each exam you see the mark and grade per subject, the total and mean, and, depending on the school’s settings, the position in class.

Report cards

The report card is the formal document at the end of a term. It carries the marks, the grades, the class teacher’s comment and the head’s comment.

Download it from Documents and keep it. Schools are asked for old report cards more often than you would expect — for transfers, bursaries and admissions — and having your own copy saves a trip.

Reading results usefully

Look at the subject pattern, not the total. A mean of 62 made of four strong subjects and one very weak one needs a different response from a flat 62 across the board.

Look at the trend. One exam is noise; three in a row going the same way is a signal. The trend graph is the most useful thing on this screen.

Read the comments. Teachers write them to be read. They usually name the specific thing — not finishing work, not asking when stuck, arriving late — that the marks alone do not show.

Be careful with position. Position in a class of 40 moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your child. The mark and the trend say more.

Competency-based reporting

Under CBC, subjects are also reported against competencies and performance levels rather than only a percentage.

These describe what your child can actually do. A level against “communicates ideas clearly in writing” tells you more about what to work on at home than a mark out of 100.

What to do about a bad result

Do not lead with it. A parent view that turns into an interrogation every time an exam is released stops being useful, because your child learns to dread the conversation.

Ask what happened, and listen. Sometimes it is a topic missed while absent, sometimes it is a teacher change, sometimes it is that they did not revise.

Check attendance for the weeks before the exam. Missed lessons show up in results a month later.

Check what they have been working through in the portal. It shows which topics they were getting wrong before the exam did.

Talk to the class teacher. Use the school’s messaging or ring. Teachers would much rather have the conversation in week 3 than at the end of term.

If a result looks wrong

Contact the school. Marks are entered by hand, and mistakes happen — a transposed figure, a mark against the wrong student.

Say which exam, which subject and what you expected. The school can check the entry against the script.