How to tell whether your child’s maths progress report is honest

Every app, tuition centre and school sends parents some form of progress update. Most of them are technically accurate and still tell you almost nothing about whether your child can pass the board exam.

This is not usually dishonesty. It is incentive. A report that says your child is doing well makes you feel good about the money you are spending. A report that says the foundation is cracked makes you consider leaving. Every product measured on retention learns, without anyone deciding it, to write the first kind.

Here is how to read one properly.

Effort metrics are not ability metrics

Hours studied, questions attempted, streaks, badges, lessons completed, percentage of the syllabus covered. All of these measure how busy your child was. None of them measures whether they can now solve a problem alone.

Four questions to ask of any report

Whatever platform or tutor you use, these four questions will tell you whether the report is worth reading:

• Does it ever deliver bad news? A report that has never once told you something uncomfortable is not measuring anything difficult. This is the fastest test, and most reports fail it.
• Does it distinguish helped from unhelped? Solving with three hints and solving cold are entirely different achievements. If the report counts them the same, it is counting the wrong thing.
• Does it name a specific gap? “Needs to work on Trigonometry” is not actionable. “Cannot rationalise a denominator, which is why Trigonometry is failing” is.
• Would it predict the board result? If your child scored exactly what this report implies, would you be surprised in February? If yes, the report is decorative.

What a useful report contains

A report worth your time tells you four things:

• What the child can now do without help, stated plainly.
• What is not solid yet, named as a specific skill rather than a chapter.
• Which earlier foundation is causing it, when there is one.
• What happens next, and what you should do, if anything.

Notice that three of those four can be uncomfortable to read. That is the point. A report you are always happy to open is a marketing email.

How we do it, and why we accept the cost

The weekly update Young Math Brains sends parents says what the student can do unaided, what is not solid, and which earlier idea is behind it. When a chapter is weak, it says so in those words.

This is commercially worse for us than a cheerful report would be. Some parents read an honest assessment and conclude their child is struggling and cancel. We think a product that quietly lets a family walk into February unprepared has failed at the only job that mattered, so we would rather lose those subscriptions.

You do not have to take our word for that. Read one weekly email during the trial and check whether it tells you anything you did not want to hear.