Every school already has a result card. The question is usually not what to put on one, but why the one you have produces arguments — and that almost always traces to a small number of decisions nobody wrote down.
What the card has to carry
The school’s own identity, at the top: name, address, and the logo if you have one. This is a document families keep for years; it should say where it came from without being asked.
The student, unambiguously: name, father’s or guardian’s name, class and section, roll number and admission number. Names repeat. Admission numbers do not.
The examination, named and dated. “First Term” alone is not enough once a family has three years of cards — the academic year belongs on the card too.
The subjects, one row each, with:
- marks obtained,
- total marks for that paper,
- and the grade, if you grade per subject.
The totals, and here the rule that prevents most disputes: the totals row must be the sum of the rows above it. If your card prints a percentage that a parent cannot reproduce by adding the subject rows, you will be asked about it, and the honest answer is usually that two different calculations are on the same page.
Attendance, if your school prints it — as days present out of days marked, not as a bare percentage with no denominator.
Remarks, written by the person who actually teaches the child, and signature lines for the class teacher and the head.
Grade bands that mean something
Most cards carry a grading scale, and most scales are inherited from whatever the previous card used. Two things are worth deciding deliberately:
Where the pass mark sits. A 33% pass and a 40% pass are both entirely ordinary in Pakistani schools, and the card should state which yours is — printing a grade of “D” without saying whether D passes tells a family nothing.
Whether the bands are yours. A scale hard-coded by software is a scale that disagrees with your own school’s policy the first time it matters. It should be a setting, expressed as bands with a pass flag on each:
| Marks | Grade | Passes |
|---|---|---|
| 80 and above | A+ | yes |
| 70–79 | A | yes |
| 60–69 | B | yes |
| 50–59 | C | yes |
| 40–49 | D | yes |
| Below 40 | F | no |
That table is an example, not a recommendation. Yours should be the one your school already uses.
Absent, unmarked, and zero are three different things
This is the single most common defect in a hand-made card, and it is worth being strict about:
- Unmarked — nobody has entered a mark for this paper yet. Print a dash.
- Absent — the child did not sit the paper. Print “ABS”, and count it as zero in the total if your school does, but never print it as a bare 0.
- Zero — the child sat the paper and scored nothing.
A card that renders all three identically is a card that cannot explain itself, and the first parent to ask will be right to.
Position, if you print it
Optional, and genuinely contested — some schools have stopped entirely. If you do print it:
Rank across the class, not within the section. A section is an administrative split; ranking inside one makes a child’s position depend on which room they were placed in, which is not a fact about the child.
Ties share a position, and the next rank skips. 82, 79, 79, 75 gives positions 1, 2, 2, 4. Breaking a tie by admission number invents a difference the marks do not support.
A student with an unmarked paper should not be ranked at all until their result is complete — their term is unfinished, not last.
Printing in Urdu as well as English
Common here, and the part most likely to go wrong for a reason that has nothing to do with the content: Urdu needs a font that shapes it.
Arabic-script text is cursive — letters join, and their form changes depending on what sits either side. A font without proper shaping support renders the letters disconnected, or drops the joins on particular pairs, and the result is text a reader can decode but immediately distrusts. It is worse than printing in English alone, because it looks careless on a document about their child.
If you are printing bilingual cards, check three things on a real printed page before you print three hundred:
- Words that use lam-alef (لا) — the pair most often broken.
- A long subject name in Urdu, to see whether it wraps or overflows.
- The direction of a mixed line — an Urdu label followed by an English number. Getting the separator on the wrong side of the label is a common rendering artefact, and it makes the line read backwards.
Reprinting, a year later
A card must reprint identically. If a family comes back in eighteen months and the reprint disagrees with the copy they hold — because a grading scale was edited in between, or a mark was corrected — you have a problem no explanation resolves.
This is why grades should be stored as they were issued rather than recalculated at print time. Changing a scale should apply to results entered afterwards, deliberately, not silently rewrite documents already in families’ hands.
A blank one to print
We keep a free result card template — ten subject rows, a totals row that adds up, attendance and a remarks line. Nothing is gated. Print it, or see one produced from your own records.