Setting up an exam

Building the structure so teachers can enter marks. 10 minutes with the wizard, or a very long afternoon without it.

Sidebar → Offline Examinations

Four things have to exist before a single mark can be typed:

Layer	What it is
Exam types	The components of a subject's assessment — Theory, Practical, Periodic Test
Grades	How a percentage becomes a letter
The exam	Half Yearly 2026-27, with its dates
The mark distribution	For every class × subject × component: maximum and pass marks

That last one is the wall. Eight classes with six subjects and two components each is 96 rows to type by hand, per exam.

Use Quick Setup

The wizard builds all four layers at once.

1. Pick a marks pattern, or build your own components:

Preset	Structure
Single Paper	Written Exam — 100, pass 33
Theory + Practical	Theory 80 (pass 27) + Practical 20 (pass 7)
CBSE Term	Periodic Test 10 + Notebook 5 + Subject Enrichment 5 + Term Exam 80

2. Pick the classes it applies to
3. Name the exam and set its dates
4. Preview — it counts exactly what will be created

Then save. The wizard creates the exam, creates any missing exam types, seeds a standard eight-band grade scale if you have no grades yet, and generates the whole mark-distribution grid in one go.

The preset is a starting point, not a limit

Start from a preset and add rows — Notebook, project work, oral — until it matches how your school actually assesses. Up to 15 components per subject.

Run one wizard per marks pattern, not per school

If your primary classes sit a single paper and your seniors sit theory plus practical, that is two runs of the wizard, each with its own classes selected. One run with all classes gives everybody the same structure.

Grades

Exam Setup → Manage Grades

Field	Notes
Name	A1, B2, Pass
Min percentage	Bottom of the band
Max percentage	Top of the band
Description	Outstanding, Excellent, and so on

Overlapping bands are rejected — two grades cannot both claim 85%.

Leave no gaps between bands

If A2 ends at 80 and B1 starts at 71, a student on 80.5 falls in a hole and gets no grade at all. The seeded scale uses continuous bands (89.99 then 90) for exactly this reason. Copy that pattern.

Doing it by hand

If you need a structure the wizard cannot express:

1. Exam Setup → Exam Types — add each component with an abbreviation
2. Exam Setup → Manage Grades — your grade bands
3. Exam Setup → Manage Offline Exams — the exam, with a session, name, start and end date
4. Schedule & Marks Setup — the maximum and pass marks for each class, subject and component, plus the exam date and timings

Admit cards

Each exam has its own admit card settings, controlling whether cards are released at all, the window during which they can be downloaded, and whether unpaid fees block them.

Fee lock	Effect
Off	Dues are ignored
Soft	Blocked, but office staff with the override permission can issue anyway
Hard	Blocked for everyone until the dues are cleared

With a lock on, you also set the maximum allowed due — a small threshold lets a family owing ₹50 still collect a card.

The fee check looks at every unpaid rupee, of any year

Outstanding dues are totalled across all of a student's fees, not just this year's. An old balance nobody ever wrote off will block this year's admit card.

Before an exam with a hard lock, run through Search Due Fees and clear out the stale balances. Otherwise you will spend the morning of the exam issuing overrides.

Cards can also be put on hold for an individual student, with a reason the family sees.

Deleting an exam

Refused if marks, distributions or schedules hang off it — deleting would take the students' marks with it. Rename or archive the exam instead.

Real example

Apex Academy, Half Yearly 2026-27:

1. Quick Setup, CBSE Term pattern, classes 6–10 → exam created, 4 exam types, 180 distribution rows generated in one click
2. Quick Setup again, Single Paper, classes 1–5
3. Grades already existed from onboarding, so nothing was seeded
4. Admit cards: released two weeks ahead, soft fee lock at ₹500, so the office could still issue to families mid-payment

Time taken: under fifteen minutes. The same setup by hand had taken them two days the previous year.

Common problems

What you see	Cause
Teachers see no subjects to enter marks against	The mark distribution has not been generated for that class and subject
A student gets no grade at all	Their percentage falls in a gap between two grade bands
"Grade range overlaps an existing grade"	Two bands claim the same percentage
Everyone in a class has the wrong maximum marks	The wizard was run with the wrong pattern for those classes. Re-run it for just those classes
Admit cards will not download	Not released yet, outside the download window, a fee lock, or a per-student hold
A paid-up family still cannot get an admit card	Their dues total includes an old unpaid balance from a previous year
The exam cannot be deleted	Marks or schedules exist. That refusal is protecting them