Ask your TPO, your director and your accreditation coordinator for last season's placement percentage. In many colleges you'll get three different answers, and all three people will be able to defend theirs. That isn't carelessness. It's what happens when one season's data lives in a dozen places.
Where the numbers drift apart
Placement data usually starts clean. A master list of final-year students exists somewhere. Then the season begins and the copies multiply:
- Each drive gets its own eligibility sheet, filtered by hand from the master list.
- Shortlists arrive from companies as PDFs or spreadsheets with their own column names.
- Offer status is updated in one file, but not in the sheet the director's report reads from.
- Students who opt out, go for higher studies or get multiple offers are tracked differently by different people.
By the end of the season, nobody's file is wrong, exactly. They just answer slightly different questions. Is the denominator every final-year student, or only those who registered for placements? Does a student with two offers count once or twice? Are internship-to-PPO conversions placements?
Fix the definitions first
Before you change any tools, write down your definitions and get leadership to agree to them. One page is enough:
- Who counts as eligible for placement, and how opting out is recorded.
- What counts as placed: offer made, offer accepted, or joined.
- How multiple offers are counted, and which salary is reported.
- How higher studies and entrepreneurship are recorded.
Then keep one record per student
The real fix is structural. Every drive should read from the same student record, and every status change should be written back to it. When a student moves from shortlisted to offered, that change should be visible to the TPO, the HOD and the report at the same moment, because they're all looking at the same row.
This is the idea FabScreen is built around. Each drive moves students through the same six stages, from Eligible to Placed, and every report reads from those stages. But you can apply the principle with any system: fewer copies, one owner per field, and status changes recorded where they happen, not reconstructed at the end.
A pre-season checklist
- Agree on the placement definitions above and share them with every coordinator.
- Freeze and verify the final-year master list before the first drive.
- Decide who is allowed to change a student's status, and where.
- Set a weekly check where the season's numbers are reviewed against the master list, not at the end.
Do this before the first company arrives and the end-of-season report becomes a download, not a project.