Mock Exams, a New Contour Learning Portal, and Our New GM

Dear Students, Parents & Staff (again),

Some of you were probably wondering if we’d remember to write another one¹ … And after many reminders from Amitav, I—Angad—eventually got around to it.

So, here we go again! In this month’s newsletter² , we’re pulling the curtain back on:

Behind-the-scenes of running mock exams for 1,000+ VCE students—what could go wrong?

Our priority from Day One has been to help students achieve their potential, both academic and personal.

Now, it’s not too difficult to do this when you have 10 students, or 50 students, or even 100 students.

But when hundreds crosses over into the thousands, the question becomes:

That’s where the real challenge begins, and it is an obstacle very few have actually crossed (or at least, crossed and done a good job of it).

Why mock exams?

Most people will agree based on their past experience at school, that sitting mock exams is one of the best ways to simulate and prepare for the real exam.

From handing in your phone, waiting for the exam to be handed out, all the way to hearing the invigilator’s footsteps as they walk around the room—as if trying to intimidate you—to figuring out how to use all the spare writing time you might have left, or making sure you don’t choke, freeze, or panic on a difficult question.

Mock exams are designed to help you know exactly what to do when it comes to the real one! So instead of walking in blind, you walk in with confidence—Oh, I’ve already done this before.

The Contour mock exams is something we’ve run in past years, and always received overwhelmingly positive feedback.

What could go wrong?

So why can’t we just “run them the same way again”? The thing is, that’s much easier said than done this year, at this scale.

How do you actually run mock exams at such a large scale? We can’t just ‘tell’ students to simply ‘rock up’. Everyone needs to know exactly where to go, and when.

What about the actual exams? There’s no point running them if we’re just going to use VCAA exams, so we have to make our own, of course.

What about invigilation conditions? We need extra furniture, seating plans, collecting the exams without losing any.

And oh—what about marking? This isn’t just a handful of exams or marks. It’s quite literally more than a thousand exams, and over 100,000 marks.

A quote that we really like when it comes to figuring out how to do things at scale is:

So, what did we do?

It came down to processes and systems. If a system works for 100 exams but not for 1,000, then it ain’t good enough. If it works for 1,000, it should work until we reach at least 10,000.

Jeffrey (Head of Chemistry), James (Head of Mathematics), Akshay (our Operations Manager), and I (Angad, Head of Physics) put together a process which allowed us to collect, mark, scan, upload, and return the mock exams for thousands of students.

It’s now been a few weeks, and we’ve returned a majority of the exams back. But we’re still going, so the process isn’t quite perfect 🥶 

Something we didn’t consider is just how long it’d take to physically scan 1,000+ exams—so even though our process of collecting, marking, uploading, and returning the exams is very efficient, scanning them was an unprecedented challenge.

Something to improve moving into the Term 3 exams!

The brand new Contour Learning Portal is (finally) ready to be released.

Speaking of challenges, what if we just rebuilt our Learning Portal entirely from scratch, exclusively for Contour?

This was an idea that we would’ve thrown around as a distant fantasy just a couple of years ago—and now, just a couple of years later, well, it’s exactly what we did!

We knew that our current Learning Portal (Podia) had its limitations. It was very rigid, had a lot of student experience issues, and gave us very little flexibility for future development and new features.

We looked at over 20 alternatives in the market for our current solution, but alas, none of them offered the customisation and the premium feel that we required.

We put together a huge design and development brief, and the hunt for the best software development companies began—the people we would entrust to build our Learning Portal from scratch.

Akshay (our Operations Manager) and Amitav sat through over 100+ consultations and ‘discovery calls’ to figure out who would be willing to take on our challenge of basically recreating Podia—but better—and for a cent on the dollar³ .

We eventually did find someone that was ready to take on the challenge. And development began… all the way back in December.

The project was meant to be completed within a few months, but as software development projects go, they end up costing twice as much, and take three times as long. So, here we are in August, finally announcing that we’re done!

After rigorous testing, fixing thousands of bugs, hundreds of calls and back-and-forths with the developers, our new portal is (finally) ready to share with everyone. Tutors and staff will begin to announce it in classes, and you’ll begin to receive invitation emails. Expect this in the coming days or weeks.

So, what’s next for the learning portal?

The super cool thing—and something we’re really excited about—is because this product is ours from the ground up, we can build it and improve it however we want in the months and years to come.

Genuinely, thank you so much for everyone’s support and patience with this huge project. We didn’t think we’d build our own tech product this soon at Contour, but here we are, and it’s a heartwarming moment for us as well to take a pause and reflect.

We’re so keen to use this as a framework moving forward. If you have ideas and suggestions, feel free to let us know :)

Meet our first ever General Manager—Emily!

There are sooo many things we could share, but this time, we want to dedicate the third behind-the-scenes to a person. As we’ve been scaling and getting bigger, our staff team has also more than tripled in size.

At the end of last year (some of you might remember), we had no reception desk at our Glen Campus, let alone reception staff! Since then, we’ve hired over 15 student & parent staff to help deal with the exponential influx of enrolment inquiries, billing and invoicing related questions, and general correspondence at Contour.

Our first hire was someone that many of you may know and have spoken to—Emily Lam.

We basically had no processes in place at this time.

On her first day, Emily received—by far—the most dodgy and unprepared onboarding. She came in and was given an impromptu crash course on how to use all our systems by Amitav and I, and then she started her first shift straight away.

And yet somehow, despite our fairly unorganised training process, Emily took on all our feedback, and was open-minded from Day One.

She knew she was joining a team that was growing (very quickly) and that our systems and processes didn’t exist (yet). But as we hired and onboarded more people, both Emily and Ansh Shah (our team supervisor at the time) were always intent on making sure that the new staff were always comfortable, and Emily was taking initiative to make sure all students and parents were being taken care of.

At this point, hundreds if not thousands of students and parents were enquiring, and we knew we had to scale the team fast to meet demands. So, we got extremely busy building our systems—documentation and processes (finally) to hire, onboard, and train new staff.

All this time, Emily’s proactivity and initiative continued, despite the workload increasing as the team got larger. We soon realised that with so many staff, there was a general lack of direction, vision, an leadership in our student & parent support teams, because we simply did not have the contact hours to be there when needed.

So, it became apparent we needed a leader…

…And it just so happened that someone on the team was going above and beyond, and had a genuine desire to make sure every student and parent always had a happy experience at Contour—regardless of whether they were enrolled or not!

This someone was Emily.

Whether it’s a tutor or staff member struggling with something, or a new parent walking into Campus for the first time, Emily has consistently shown her dedication to ensuring a quality Contour experience.

All this to say, her work definitely didn’t go unnoticed, and early in July, we appointed Emily as our new—and first ever—General Manager. She also took a major personal step by deferring her university studies and committing full-time to Contour and her team.

We couldn’t be happier for Emily, and even though this new role has posed a lot of new challenges for her, it’s been amazing to watch her tackle them head on, and work tirelessly to support her team every single day, and make sure they feel empowered to do their best.

And our goal, of course, is to help empower and support Emily, so she continues to feel confident and make big strides forward, growing further in her role.

Emily’s journey at Contour is just one of many examples of an individual’s vision aligning with ours, and how they made Contour their full-time gig.

We have a few more incredibly hard-working people in the team who are on a similar pathway to Emily’s situation (and our goal is to empower a whole team of leaders to help grow our departments and ultimately our impact on education), but for today, we wanted to show our gratitude and appreciation for Emily’s work 🙏

Aaaand, that’s a wrap!

This newsletter has been super delayed, but we appreciate you for reading this far. We still have lots of exciting things to announce and reveal, but are going to keep drip-feeding them via these newsletters ;)

Remember to give us feedback.

Your feedback drives us, and we take it very seriously. If you have ideas, suggestions, or questions, don't hesitate to reply to this email. We’ll try our best to reply ourselves! We’re here and we’re listening.

A quick reminder too, of the best places to reach out to us:

• If you have any questions or queries about signing up to new subjects, trials, or enrolments - [email protected]

• If you have any issues or concerns regarding billing or invoices - [email protected]

• And if you want to speak with someone awesome from our team, we’re just a call away at 1800 888 300. Reach out!

The Contour Community

Again, the majority of our students come from humble referrals from students and parents; so as always, if you love what we’re doing, it means a LOT to us if you’d kindly pass on the word about Contour to any friend, colleague, or family member 🙏 

Just like our community, our impact grows through your support and referrals. We know something special is happening at Contour, and we definitely want as many people to be a part of this journey as possible 💪 

Wishing you success.

P.S. You can read the first edition of our newsletter here.

Warm regards,

Angad & Amitav

Founders, Contour Education

1  You can read the first edition of our newsletter here.

2  “This month’s newsletter” is technically for July, so just pretend we’re going back in time.

3  This ‘cent’ still ended up being 6-figures ☠️