We get asked fairly often why we built a dedicated admissions product instead of folding application management into EduMawu SIS as just another tab. This post is an honest look at that decision, and at what we think still needs work.
Admissions and day-to-day school administration have very different usage patterns. Admissions is bursty — quiet for months, then intensely busy for a few weeks — and involves people who aren't yet part of the school (prospective parents) rather than people who already are. Treating it as its own product let us design a much simpler, more public-facing application flow without compromising the internal tools school staff use every day in EduMawu SIS.
The part we're proudest of is the merit list engine, which lets each school define its own ranking and quota logic rather than forcing every school into one fixed formula. The part we're least satisfied with, honestly, is document upload on very low-end Android devices, where large scanned PDFs can be slow to upload on a weak connection — that's an area we're actively working on this quarter.
This post is in draft while we finish gathering feedback from the schools currently piloting the newest admissions dashboard — expect an updated version before it goes fully public.