A child in Class 5 needs the result card from Class 4 last year, or from Class 1 three years ago. Until now Examination Reports could not print it — and it did not say so. It returned an empty page, which reads like the records were deleted. They were not. They are all still there.
What was actually wrong
Every report on this screen starts by asking "who is in this class?" — and it answered with today's class list: the children sitting in the selected class right now, who are still marked Currently Enrolled. Change the dates all you like; the list of children never moved. So the moment a child is promoted, or leaves, their old marks fall out of reach, even though every mark is still on file with the class, section, exam and date it was taken under.
How much this hid: at one real school with four years of exams, only 4 in every 100 marks on file could be printed. For the whole of one past year, across all fifteen classes, the answer was none at all.
The fix: the Result Type choice
Open Advanced Filters on Examination Reports. The first thing in the panel, above every dropdown, is RESULT TYPE — a pair of buttons: Current Result and Historical Result. One of the two is always selected, and the line underneath tells you which question the report is about to answer.
Choose Historical Result and the question changes from "who is in this class today" to "who actually sat these exams". That is the whole change. Every filter you already use — class, section, exam, subject, dates — keeps working exactly as before; they now describe the exams rather than the children.
Leave it on Current Result and nothing about this screen is different. Current Result is how the screen arrives, and it is what every report on it has always done. Every report you run on it produces byte-for-byte the same page it did before. Nothing is switched on behind your back, and there is nothing to configure.
Result History — so you do not have to guess the dates
A historical report needs a From and To date, and nobody can be expected to remember when Class 4 sat its exams two years ago. Guess wrong and you get an empty report, which is exactly the confusion this feature exists to remove.
So press Result History, beside the two Result Type buttons. It lists every exam sitting that actually has marks on file — the class, the section, the exam, the exact dates, how many children and how many subjects — grouped by year. Click a row and the filters fill themselves in. Then press Preview or Generate as usual.
- Pick a student first (the Select Student box) and Result History shows that child's whole trajectory — every class they have ever been examined in, oldest to newest. This is the one to use for "print this child's old result card".
- Pick no student and it shows the selected class's own sittings across all years — the one to use for "reprint last year's Class 4 result cards".
What the printed card says
The card prints the class, section and session as they were when the exam was taken, not as they are now, because those were written onto each mark at the time. Subject names, marks, per-subject grades and remarks are likewise the originals.
Four things that are genuinely not recoverable — please read this part
- A deleted student is gone. If somebody removed the student record entirely, their marks have no name to print against and cannot appear on any report. Marking a child as left is fine — that is exactly what this feature recovers. Deleting them is not.
- The overall grade is recalculated with today's grading policy. Each subject's own grade and remark were saved with the mark and print as they were. The total grade at the bottom is worked out fresh each time from the grading policy attached to that class now. If you have changed your grade boundaries since, an old card will not match the paper copy you issued.
- Roll number, registration number, guardian name and photo are the current ones. Those live on the student record, which only ever holds today's values. A child whose roll number changed will print the new one on an old card.
- A mark with an unreadable exam date cannot be reached by any date range. Result History flags these as "undated" on the row they belong to. Correct the date on the award list and they become printable.
"Historical Result" and "Old Classes Data" are not the same control
Both are on this screen and they do different jobs. They can be used together.
- Old Classes Data — a tick-box further down the panel. For one child, count marks from any class, and drop the class/section/group/session/subject/exam filters entirely.
- Historical Result — the Result Type choice at the top. Change which children the report is about, and keep every filter working.
If you want "Class 4's Final Term last year, printed properly", that is Result Type set to Historical Result on its own, with Old Classes Data left alone.
If a session or a class was deleted
Marks are stamped with the session that was current when they were entered. If somebody later deletes that session from the Sessions screen, the Session filter can no longer offer it. With Result Type set to Historical Result those marks are put back in anyway, provided you have left Session on All Sessions — narrowing the sessions deliberately still narrows them. Result History names the missing one as, for example, "Session #4", so you can see it exists.
The same courtesy is not possible for a deleted class: the filter is a class, so if the class row is gone the history row says "Class #12" and clicking it sets the dates only. Do not delete classes that have exam results against them.
Who can use it
Anybody who can already open Examination Reports. This is a control on an existing screen, not a new screen, so there is no new permission to grant and nothing is taken away from anybody.
Do be aware that it makes past pupils' results reachable to everyone who holds this screen — which is the point, but it is worth knowing.