The pilot
The pilot: an instrument you own
A pilot with PrepGraph is an instrument, not a free trial. Its purpose is to produce a written result you can hand to your board, including the result where nothing moved. Say the status of the machinery plainly: our pilot tooling is written and tested, its production migration is recorded in our own ledger with an unknown applied status, and it has never carried a pilot to a published result for any school anywhere. Yours would be the first end-to-end run, and where it breaks that is our failure to report to you.
- Steps
- 8
- Measures
- 5
- Growth claim
- None
- Result owner
- You
How it runs
The sequence, in order
- 01
Seats and price in writing, before anything else
Our ordinary enrolment path grants a 7-day trial and school-level grants are refused by our entitlement checker as ineffective; the pilot grant is a separate per-student path. We will show you the setting, and hold a test student through day eight in front of you before your cohort starts. If it turns out to be seven days, you would find out in week two with an empty usage curve. Who pays for the pilot seats is settled in writing before day one.
- 02
Clearance recorded per student
Before we provision anyone, a named person records granted, declined or withdrawn against each student, with the person and timestamp attached; a student who is not granted is never provisioned and never messaged, and a withdrawal offboards them automatically. Be exact about what that is: it is your clearance recorded by us, not verifiable parental consent. We have no direct-notice text for parents, no verification method, and no scope or expiry on the record. Writing that notice is a prerequisite, and we will not run a pilot on children before it exists.
- 03
The baseline is yours
Our tooling can assign a PrepGraph practice exam as baseline and a second set as final and score both. We will not use it for you. It should be a test you already trust, given how you already give it, scored by your people. Our bank was built for Indian curricula, our US K-12 items are model-generated, and we have no item calibration — so the second set would not be an equated parallel form and we would be grading our own homework. The matched comparison then happens outside our product, from your mark sheet and our export, by hand. We would rather do the arithmetic by hand than own the ruler.
- 04
Windows, and a gate that stops us
The baseline window opens two days before your start date and closes three days after it; the final window opens four days before your end date and closes the day after. The pilot does not start until 70% of the cohort has completed the baseline — below that the software holds it and flags it to us, and we come back to you rather than starting on a broken measurement. [code, 1 Sep 2026.] Take a semester rather than a short window if your calendar allows; the dates go in the agreement.
- 05
Teachers get the queue every morning
Overnight bands, a ranked reteach queue with names attached, a school-wide at-risk register. If a grade team is not willing to change what gets taught on Tuesday because of what the queue said on Monday, the diagnosis has nowhere to go and the pilot measures nothing but curiosity.
- 06
A check-in we may not be able to ship
The tooling is built to send a daily check-in and check-out to whoever you nominate and record a one-to-five rating. Its status: the messaging leg has never been configured in production, it was built for Indian families on WhatsApp, its schedule is set in Indian time, and the US email version does not exist. If we cannot build it before your baseline opens, we run without it and say so in the report rather than pretend the channel existed. And if we do build it we would be messaging your students or families daily using contact details you gave us — what may be sent, how a family stops it, and our deleting the list at the end all belong in the agreement.
- 07
The report, booked before anyone knows the numbers
A week before your end date the tooling raises the task to book the debrief. The report states how many were on the roster, cleared, provisioned and logged in, and how many had used PrepGraph before the pilot; the four measures each against the target agreed in writing before day one, marked met or not met; matched-pair score statistics with the number of pairs stated and exclusions printed rather than hidden; survey comments quoted only where that person consented in writing and otherwise summarised; and caveats the software adds itself, including students whose practice counts include work from outside the pilot. It is generated by us and handed to you — there is no self-serve export of it — though you can export the underlying mark sheets as CSV whenever you want.
- 08
Publication, on your terms
Whatever it shows gets written up and published; that is the reason to be a founding partner rather than a customer. Three limits protect you and you should enforce them. You approve the exact dataset and wording — you direct the disclosure, we do not. We name your school only with written permission, and never attach a number to your school you have not seen and agreed. And because a single cohort in a single school is small enough to re-identify from, we suppress any cell below ten students and publish no subgroup breakdown you have not approved.
What is measured
The four things a pilot can actually establish
- Activation — how many students on the roster reached a first login.
- Usage — average days per student with practice attempted, and weekly active students.
- Completion — what share of the cohort finished each assessment window.
- Score change — baseline against final, matched student by student, reported as the number of matched pairs, the mean change, the median change, and how many students scored higher the second time.
- Four, not six. Two more appear on our own homepage today under a six-metric heading; they have no implementation behind them, we are correcting that page, and we are not offering them.
What failure looks like
Five ways this fails, named in advance so nobody argues about the definition afterwards. One: fewer than seven in ten students complete the baseline, so the pilot never starts — a failure of our setup and your calendar, far better caught before the measurement than after. Two: students are provisioned and do not log in — an activation failure, and usually ours. Three: students log in and do not practice — the most common death, and the one thing we cannot fix for you from a distance. Four: teachers see the queue every morning and nothing changes in the schedule — a failure of the intervention half, and worth knowing about your own building. Five: everything runs, students practice, teachers act, and the score does not move. That is a real finding about our software, and it gets published on the same terms as a good one.
A pilot that cannot fail is not an instrument, it is a demonstration. This one is written so that a null result is a publishable outcome rather than an awkward conversation.
Disqualify us early
PrepGraph is not right for you if
Each of these is a limit in the product as it stands on 1 September 2026, not a negotiating position. If three of them are dealbreakers we are the wrong vendor this school year, and this page is the cheapest place for you to find that out. If one or two are, name them on the first call and we will tell you honestly whether they change before your decision date or whether they do not.
- You are an elementary school. Our bank has no exam-tagged questions for kindergarten through sixth grade, and K-5 practice items are model-generated at request time. A pilot built on those would fail in public, which is bad for you and worse for us.
- Your evaluation rubric has a line for standards alignment. We have ingested no US state's official standards and no question carries a standards code. We score zero on that line and will not argue about it.
- You are in Texas and you want TEKS. We hold no TEKS codes, and the row in our database carrying that name is scoped to Indian Class 11 and 12 chemistry and biology — and is the only US row our runtime will serve unguarded.
- You roster through Clever, ClassLink, OneRoster, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Google Classroom or LTI. We integrate with none of them. Sign-in is email and password or a consumer social login, with no district identity provider and no domain restriction.
- You need student data resident in the United States. Our production database and identity records are in India and a US deployment does not exist.
- Signature depends on a FERPA program, a signed student data privacy agreement, a SOC 2 report or a VPAT. We have none of the four, and none of them clears this school year.
- Your agreement requires the school to direct deletion of a named student's record, or to get your data back or destroyed when you leave. Deletion runs through the student's own account, most records are deactivated rather than erased, and there is no export or contract-end purge.
- You need written no-training and zero-retention terms with every AI provider before students touch the product. We cannot show you those today.
- You need a documented child-safety and crisis-escalation protocol for an AI that talks to children one to one. We searched our own codebase for self-harm, crisis and safeguarding handling and found none. Your staff are mandatory reporters and our product would be a disclosure channel with no defined path behind it.
- Your students need accommodations, or instruction in a language other than English. There is no IEP or 504 field, no extended-time setting, nothing that reads a service plan, and US tutoring is English-only by policy. If your population is heavily newcomer or heavily served under IDEA, this will not serve them and we would rather not take the money.
- You need parents to be able to see or challenge what the software says about their child. There is no parent-facing view and no amendment path.
- You expect your own tests to produce the concept gaps. Teacher-entered marks are stored and audited but carry no concept tag and never reach the model.
- You cannot commit to students actually practising inside the product. No usage, no data, empty grid, nothing to report.
- You need every student covered automatically by the school's licence after the pilot. A school-level grant does not switch on student access in our system, and there is no US school price yet.
- Your board expects a network-wide view. The top scope in our academic reporting is one school; a user account belongs to exactly one school; campus is not a dimension in any academic view; and putting several schools under one account to fake a combined view would let every administrator see every school's students. We will not set it up that way and you should not ask any vendor to.
- You want a vendor's outcome number for a board packet. We do not have one and we will not invent one.
Next step
If none of the disqualifiers above rules you out, the next step is a conversation about whether the prerequisites can be met on a timeline that suits your year — not a demo.