Grading Schemes That Survive an Audit

If your grade boundaries live in a spreadsheet formula, you do not have a scheme. You have whatever the last person edited.

A grading scheme is a set of decisions: how internals weigh against theory, what happens to a candidate who is absent for one paper, whether a borderline mark is rounded and at what point. Written down, those decisions take a page. Left implicit, they get re-decided every cycle by whoever is holding the file.

The test of a scheme is whether two people, working separately from the same marks, produce the same result. If they cannot, the ambiguity is in the scheme and no amount of checking output will find it — the two of them will simply be consistent in different directions.

Configure it once, in one place, and make the configuration visible on the result itself. When a parent or a board asks why a grade is what it is, the answer should be a rule you can point at, dated, with the person who approved it named beside it.