Academic Intelligence & Research
Three students score sixty-two. The number cannot tell them apart.
We are the research group of PrepGraph, an Indian education company. We work on what can honestly be said about one child’s learning, early enough for her teacher to act on it, and we write for principals and teachers first.
Abstract
Consider one Tuesday. One teacher, fifty-five students, forty minutes, and a syllabus with a date on it. The only instrument she is held to is the mark, and the mark arrives after the unit has closed. A common paper, set and marked outside the school, is among the fairer instruments Indian schooling has: comparable across schools that share nothing else, and hard for anyone inside a school to curate. It is a serviceable instrument for ranking children and a poor one for teaching them, and Indian schooling uses it for both, because at the moment a decision about a child is made it has nothing else it trusts.
What the mark discards is never general. It is always the particular thing the teacher would have needed: which topic, which misunderstanding, which idea from an earlier year that everything since has rested on, which skill, and worst of all which moment. The week in which a small error was ten minutes of work opens early in a chapter and closes long before the report card is printed. By March the wrong method has been practised until it is the child’s settled method.
The obvious repair is to describe the child more richly, and that is harder than it sounds. A wrong answer is ambiguous: the idea may never have been understood, the question may have been misread in a language not spoken at home, the arithmetic may have slipped, or the clock may have run out. A classroom produces thin evidence about any one child, work is shared and copied, and the teacher has forty minutes. A description of a child is also easier to curate than a common paper marked by a stranger, so a finer account offers more surfaces to perform on, not fewer.
So this group publishes its questions rather than its answers, and states with each what would tell us to stop. The first question below is abandoned if a claim about one child changes nothing about what her teacher does that week, or if two teachers reading the same student work cannot be brought to name the same thing. Nothing here has been measured. No study has begun, no result exists, and what has been built is a research prototype that has never been applied to a student, a teacher, a classroom or a syllabus. A finding that we are wrong will be published as it arrives; a finding that we are right will not be claimed until somebody without our interest in the outcome can check it.
Three students in the same class sit the same mathematics paper. All three score sixty-two out of a hundred. All three are entered in the register as average, and if the school runs an extra class, all three are sent to the same one and given more of the same paper.
She can carry out every procedure the paper asks for. In each long question she loses marks to one habit: when she distributes a subtraction across a bracket, she drops the sign.
NeedsTen minutes on a single habit, this week, before the wrong method becomes the method she trusts.
He answered the quadratics section without a mistake and could not begin the word problems. He cannot turn four lines of English into an equation, which is not a difficulty in this year’s chapter and will stop him again in physics.
NeedsWork that moves between a sentence and an equation, because more mathematics practice will not touch the thing that stopped him.
She knew the material and answered the last two questions in note form because the clock ran out. Reading each question took her much longer than it took the boy beside her, in a language she does not speak at home.
NeedsA response to reading under time rather than to mathematics: recorded as a subject weakness, it will be remediated in the subject and therefore not remediated at all.
One number, three children, three different things to do. Two of them do not need more mathematics, and the extra class will hand all three the same paper again. Nothing in the register separates them, so nothing in the timetable does either.
Definition
Academic intelligence
Knowledge about how one particular child is learning, gathered on purpose, so that somebody can teach her better this week.
Intelligence here carries the sense it has in military intelligence or market intelligence: knowledge about a situation, assembled deliberately, in order to act well inside it. The adjective does the limiting work, and confines it to learning. The distinction that matters is between a record and a model. A record states what a child produced: this answer, that score, this many minutes, on that date. Schools already hold far more records than anybody has time to read, and moving a record onto a screen does not change what kind of thing it is.
A model states what a record cannot: what a child knows, what she can do and under which conditions, and what she is ready for next. Those are three different claims about a person, not one claim with three names. Knows is a claim about a present state nobody can observe directly. Can do is a claim about a capability under conditions, and the conditions do more work than anyone admits. Is ready for is a claim about a future, inferred from a past that was thinly observed. Anything that runs the three together will be confidently wrong in a way that is hard to notice from outside and harder from inside. On this page the term states an intention, not a capability, and anyone who uses it, ourselves first, can fairly be asked which of the three claims they mean and what would show them to be wrong about it.
What it is not
- Not artificial intelligence under another name. Intelligence here means gathered knowledge about a situation, and says nothing about machines.
- Not a product, a pilot or a purchase; there is nothing here a school can run this term.
- Not a measure of how clever a child is. It concerns what she has learnt and what she needs next, which are different questions.
- Not a richer score. Replacing one number with a slightly better number inherits every problem described above.
Open questions
Five questions, each with the finding that would end it
There are questions about learning that are more general, better funded and much further along, and those are left to the people already working on them. These five are the ones this group cannot get around, chosen because each names something that breaks in an ordinary section of fifty-five and that we do not know how to fix.
- 01 One child, one lesson
For one named child in one named class, can what she needs next be said in words her teacher can teach on Tuesday, and put in a form that lets the teacher find us wrong by Friday?
A teacher with five sections cannot afford a diagnosis that takes longer than the remedy.
Stops ifWe stop if a claim of this kind, put in front of the teacher who could act on it, changes nothing about what she does that week — or if two teachers reading the same student work cannot be brought to name the same thing.
- 02 Different, or merely easier
If two children in one class are given different work, what has to differ about it, beyond how hard and how much, for each of them to be better off a fortnight later?
The familiar failure gives a struggling child easier and easier work, so that she answers correctly while practising around the missing idea instead of through it.
Stops ifWe stop if the only difference that survives scrutiny is quantity. Honestly, this question cannot be put at risk until the next one has an answer, and we would rather say so than imply a test we are not yet able to run.
- 03 Something a school can watch
What can a school observe about one section over one term that moves when learning moves and stays still when only activity moves, at what interval, and at what cost in teacher time?
Counts of activity rise the moment somebody is told to raise them, and the mark at the other end arrives too late to decide anything.
Stops ifWe stop if the observation can be raised by telling teachers to raise it with nothing changing in what students know, or if a school that makes it decides nothing differently for having made it.
- 04 What the teacher keeps
Which teaching tasks can be taken off a teacher without taking away the knowledge of her class that performing them gave her, and which must never leave her at all?
Marking is how a teacher finds out that eleven children made the same mistake; hand it over and she receives a report while the thing the report was meant to carry has gone.
Stops ifWe stop if teachers whose marking is automated become less able to say who in their class is lost, and that knowledge does not return by some other route. The design would then be wrong however much time it saves.
- 05 What survives July
When a child changes teacher, section or school, what should travel with her besides a mark sheet, who should own it, what should she be able to erase, and what does it cost her when it turns out to be wrong about her?
A rebalanced section, a transfer certificate or one resignation erases a working model of a child that took a year to build, and she arrives at the next desk as a stranger with a number attached.
Stops ifWe stop treating this as a question about learning if transitions go no better with carried context than without. It would remain a question about a person’s rights over what is held about them, which is a different argument and would have to be made on those grounds.
Intentions
What this is meant to put in a school’s hands
None of this exists, and some of it may never exist. These are the things the work is meant to put in a school’s hands, written down now as intentions rather than deliveries, so that they can be held against us later.
- A way of stating what one child needs next that is precise enough for her teacher to contradict, published together with the times teachers contradicted it and were right.
- Something a school can observe about its own sections during a term, described plainly enough to run without us, to copy without us, and to read against us.
- A list of teaching tasks we decline to automate, with the reasons, that does not shrink when it becomes commercially inconvenient.
- An account of a child that belongs to the child rather than to the school that generated it or the company that holds it, and that can be taken elsewhere, including to a competitor.
- The status of each research direction, abandoned or revised or sustained, with the date it changed and nothing else beside it. This is the one item that begins immediately, because it is the half of the record that costs us.
Status
Where this stands
Nothing here is a report of anything achieved. No study has begun and nothing has been measured, so there are no results to share and none being held back. What can be judged today is the quality of the questions and the honesty of what stands beside them, and both are on this page in full.
- Studies begun
- None. No measurement of any kind has been made.
- Results, papers, peer review
- None. No evaluation, no comparison against a baseline, no efficacy figure, no submissions, no external review.
- What has been built
- A research prototype, built for research rather than for schools. It has never been applied to a student, a teacher, a classroom or a syllabus.
- The open protocol
- A separate initiative, altme.org, which concerns portable person-owned memory, has a draft protocol at version 0.1, published for comment. There is no adoption to report.
- The Council
- A voluntary, non-statutory forum convened and funded by PrepGraph. It published a founding-draft research instrument on 29 August 2026, open for comment; it has no members, no ethics review panel has been appointed, and no study has begun under it. It certifies nothing and endorses no vendor, PrepGraph included.
- Our position in this market
- PrepGraph sells to schools. Any finding of ours that favours our own products should be discounted until a party without our interest in the outcome has reproduced it.
Published
- Positions, argued, that a reader can disagree with
- Research directions, and the condition that would end each
- Open problems we have not solved
- Findings that a direction is wrong, and null findings
Not published
- Methods, architectures, parameters
- Models, vendors, systems
- Platform figures and benchmarks
- Any claim that something has been shown to work
Three kinds of work
Research, responsibility, and what ships
Research discovers what is possible. The Council determines what is responsible. The products demonstrate what can be implemented.
Academic Intelligence & Research
Positions, research directions and open questions. This site.
The Council
A voluntary, non-statutory forum on responsible AI in Indian schools. Convened and funded by PrepGraph. Certifies nothing, endorses no vendor.
PrepGraph Academy
Professional development for teachers and school leaders.
The learning platform
The commercial platform used by schools and students.
Partner portal
Where schools and partners run their side of the platform.
AlterEgo
A separate initiative on portable, person-owned memory, including a draft open protocol published for comment.
Correspondence
If you run a section of fifty-five, the most useful thing you can send us is the place where this page is wrong about your week: the question that is not your problem, the one put in a way no teacher would recognise, or what you needed on the Tuesday the mark could not tell you. There is nothing here to buy and nothing to sign up for. Write to research@prepgraph.com and argue.