Publish results

Publishing is the one irreversible step in a term: it freezes a result set, and the version it freezes is the version a parent or a promotion decision will read. Ten minutes of checking before it is worth an afternoon of corrections after it.

Before you publish

• Every mark that counts is entered. A missing mark is treated as missing, not as zero, so it produces a result that is plainly incomplete.
• No correction is open for a score that counts towards the result.
• One result agrees with your own arithmetic, computed from the same marks and the same policy.
• The ranking scope is the one you mean. A class rank and a year rank are different statements, and both can be true.

What publication freezes

The result set is calculated from the marks and the policy, ranked within its scope, and stored as a snapshot. The snapshot does not change when the marks do. It is the answer to "what did we issue", which is a different question from "what would we issue now".

After publication

A correction still lands. It changes the marks, and therefore the result the school would publish now; it does not rewrite the snapshot. If a school needs a corrected version issued, it publishes again and has two versions rather than one edited one.

Promotion decisions

A promotion decision reads from the published record, not from a live calculation. That is what makes the decision reproducible: the numbers it was made from cannot move afterwards.