Add classes to an exam in 60 seconds. Bulk picker, locked dates, every student auto-linked.

How most Indian schools attach classes to an exam today

It is a Tuesday in late September in a CBSE school in Indore. The exam coordinator is preparing the half-yearly. She has the academic session list of classes from the principal's office on a printed sheet, the Class 11 commerce stream that was added in July on a sticky note, and a WhatsApp message from the Class 9 class teacher asking why his section was missing from the last unit test. Three different lists, one of them out of date, and the office runs on whichever the coordinator is holding at that moment.

The cost of getting class assignment wrong is not a small thing. A class accidentally left off the half-yearly means 38 children sit a paper that the system has no record of. Their marks land in 'unmapped exam' and have to be reconciled by hand the day before result publish. A wrong start date — a typo of 2026-09-22 instead of 2026-09-12 — means the date sheet posted to parents reads ten days later than the principal announced. Every parent calls the office. The Class 10 pre-board section that was added late gets quietly excluded from the seating plan and the admit cards. Two parents call the next morning asking why their child has no admit card.

If you have run more than two exams in an Indian school, you have lived this. Inkwelly's Examinations module makes class assignment the one thing the coordinator does in 60 seconds — a single picker, every enrolled class visible, every section accounted for, dates set per class, and the auto-link to every student wired the moment you click Save.

How exam class assignment works in Inkwelly

When the exam coordinator opens the Exam → Classes screen, she sees three things on one page. A summary card at the top — count of classes already added, count of eligible classes from the academic session, count of students already linked. A table of currently-attached classes, each with its own start date, end date, last modified timestamp and an isActive toggle. And a primary 'Add Classes' button that opens a bulk picker pre-filtered to the academic session.

The bulk picker is the workhorse of this feature. Every class published in the Academics Module for the running session is visible. Class teacher names, section labels, current student count and stream metadata (commerce, science, humanities for Class 11-12) are all shown so the coordinator does not need to second-guess. She can multi-select with checkboxes, search by class name, filter by grade level. The same picker also offers a one-click 'select all eligible' that excludes classes already attached to this exam — no duplicates possible, even on a careless click.

Per-class dates are the second decision. Most school exams run multiple papers across several days, with different sections starting on different dates. The Class 10 board pre-board may start on 18 February with English and end on 4 March with Sanskrit, while the Class 9 half-yearly runs 22-30 September. Inkwelly stores examStartDate and examEndDate per class — not per exam — so the coordinator can give each class its own window and the date sheet, admit cards and verification queue all read the right dates.

The third decision is the subject default. When a class is added, Inkwelly offers to auto-create the subject configuration with the school's standard totalMaxMarks and overallPassMarks for that grade — typically 80+20 for CBSE Class 9-10, 100 for primary, 70+30 for State Board where applicable. The coordinator accepts the defaults or overrides them at the moment of class attachment. From this single click, the Subject configuration screen is pre-populated for every class, every subject — and the subject teachers see their marks entry windows the moment SCHEDULED status is reached.

See the class assignment workflow

“Pichle saal Class 9 ki ek section reh gayi thi half-yearly mein. Office mein ek hafta laga reconciliation karne mein. Ab Inkwelly pe bulk picker se 60 second mein saari classes attach ho jaati hain.”

Real-world scenarios — how exam classes assignment plays out

The following five scenarios are the ones we have watched real Indian schools work through during exam weeks. Each one breaks a manual workflow in a way that costs the office hours, but each is solved by the class assignment screen in a single dialog.

1. A late-admission child in March. The Class 10 pre-board has been SCHEDULED for two weeks. A new admission joins on the Friday before the first paper. In Inkwelly, the moment her admission is confirmed in the Student Information Module, the auto-linked roster pulls her in. She has a seat, an admit card and marks-entry rows for every subject by Saturday morning.

2. A wound-up section in July. The Class 8 D section had only nine students at the start of the year, and was merged into Class 8 C in July. The half-yearly is in October. The eligible-only filter excludes the wound-up section automatically; it does not appear in the picker. The coordinator never has to remember which sections still exist.

3. A Class 11 commerce stream added in August. The school opens a new commerce stream after admissions close for science. The Class 11 commerce section is added to the academic session in August. The half-yearly picker in October shows it as eligible — no separate workflow, no exception code, no override required.

4. A subject teacher's WhatsApp confusion. The Class 9 maths teacher messages on the Class 9 staff WhatsApp group asking why his section is not in the marks entry screen. The coordinator opens the Exam → Classes screen, sees the section is missing, adds it via the bulk picker with the correct dates, and the marks-entry rows appear in the maths teacher's app within the next minute. No support ticket, no Excel reconciliation.

5. A board pre-board run as an inter-school event. The school is hosting two other CBSE schools for the Class 10 pre-board. Inkwelly's class assignment supports this — each visiting school's Class 10 sections are linked through the Exam Centers and Rooms feature, and the seating plan accommodates all three schools' children. The host school's classes screen still drives the date sheet and the marks workflow.

See exam class assignment running on your school's data

A 20-minute walkthrough using a sample of your existing class structure — your sections, your stream metadata, your enrolment shape. No sales pitch, no slide deck.

Limits, safety and the small print

The class assignment screen is governed by Inkwelly's eight-stage exam lifecycle. Once an exam reaches SCHEDULED, classes can still be added but their dates and subject defaults cannot be silently changed — an audit-logged transition is required. Once an exam reaches IN_PROGRESS, the class list is locked. Removing a class after IN_PROGRESS is supported only as an isActive=false toggle that preserves marks entry data; full delete requires the exam to be moved back to DRAFT, which itself is an audited transition that requires principal sign-off.

Class assignment respects role-based access. The exam coordinator and the principal can add or remove classes; subject teachers and class teachers see the read-only list. The audit log captures every write — user, timestamp, prior value, new value — and is exportable as a PDF for the affiliation cell visit. There is no soft-delete loophole; a removed class shows in the audit log as removed, with the reason field captured at the moment of removal.

For the largest schools — multi-campus chains and senior-secondary schools with 60+ sections — the class picker paginates at 20 classes per page with server-side filtering. The eligible-only filter is computed at the database level, not client-side, so a 1000-class chain sees the same 60-second add experience as a 12-class neighbourhood school. Pagination, sort and filter are stable across reloads — the exam coordinator can return to the screen after lunch and pick up where she left off.