October 2026For a school that has had to answer what a mark used to be.
Why a correction should never overwrite a mark
Corrections are ordinary. A mark is typed wrong, a script is re-marked, a student's assessment is found and entered a week late. What is not ordinary is a system that lets a correction erase the evidence of itself.
The cost of overwriting
When a mark is overwritten, three questions become unanswerable. What was the mark when the report was published? Who changed it? And why? Those questions are not hypothetical: they arrive from a parent, from a head of department, or from an inspector, and the answer decides whether the school looks careful or careless.
Overwriting is not a careless design choice so much as a default one. A cell has one value, so typing a new value removes the old one, and the spreadsheet never knew the difference.
A correction is a request with a reason
The alternative is to treat a correction as a record of its own: the previous value, the new value, the person who asked, the reason, and the person who approved it. The mark then has a history rather than a current value, and the current value is simply the latest entry in it.
- The person who raised the correction is recorded separately from the person who approved it.
- A school can require review, so a change to a mark is never made by the person it benefits.
- The previous value remains visible to anyone with the right permission, for as long as the year exists.
A published result keeps its own answer
The correction and the publication are different records. A published result was calculated from the marks as they stood on the day it was issued, and that stays true after a correction. The corrected marks produce a new result, and a school can see both: what it published, and what it would publish now.
That distinction is what lets a school correct a genuine error without rewriting what a parent was told, and it is why the product treats publication as a snapshot rather than a live view.
The record is the product
None of this is visible in a screenshot. It is visible in the third week of a dispute, when someone asks what the mark was and the school can answer in a minute. That is the sense in which a school's records are the product: the screens are how the record is entered, and the trail is why it can be trusted.
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