How a date gets published here

Nothing is taken from another education portal, an aggregator, or a coaching site. Every value comes from a document the authority itself published — the National Testing Agency, JoSAA, CSAB and the boards — and the page it appears on links to that document.

We use only material an authority has made openly available, and we link to it rather than rehosting it. Copyright in those documents belongs to the body that published them, so the original stays the original: following a link on this site takes you to the authority’s own server.

Where an authority publishes nothing on a subject, we publish nothing on it either. A gap here means a gap in the record, not a gap in our attention.

Most of what matters arrives as a PDF. Where the authority publishes text, we read it directly. Where it publishes scans — and one major authority scans every notice, so the text is an image — we run optical character recognition over the pages.

A date is only extracted when it carries a label. Notices are full of dates that mean nothing to a candidate: the day the notice was signed, the date of the circular it supersedes, a reference number that looks like a date. A date with no label attached to it is discarded rather than guessed at.

Each extracted value keeps the sentence it came from and the page it was on. That is what makes checking it a matter of seconds rather than a hunt through a forty-page bulletin.

Nothing automated publishes. Dates, fees, eligibility and results are high-impact — a wrong one can cost somebody an examination — so each is approved by a reviewer who sees the value, the line it was read from, and the parser’s own doubts about it before deciding.

Values waiting for that decision sit in a review queue, which is public. Nothing in it appears anywhere else on the site.

Rejections are kept rather than deleted, with the reason attached. Why a value was refused teaches us as much as why one was accepted: a parser that keeps producing the same wrong reading is a parser to fix.

A published value is not the same as a settled one, and the difference is marked rather than smoothed over.

• Checked — read from an official notice and approved by a reviewer, with the source linked.
• Expected — a date the authority has not yet announced. Shown because it is useful for planning, labelled because it is not a commitment anyone has made.
• Provisional — published by the authority but subject to change, or true of a previous cycle and not yet reconfirmed.
• Not yet verified — we hold no approved value. We say so rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

Authorities change dates, sometimes at short notice and sometimes without a fresh notice. We check daily, but there is a window between an authority changing something and us reading it.

OCR is a reading, not a transcript. A misread digit moves a date, so values read from scans are held to a lower confidence and are checked more carefully before publication — but the risk is not zero, which is why every value links to the original.

For anything that matters, confirm against the authority’s own notice before you act on it. Every date on this site links to the document it came from for exactly that reason. If you find something wrong, please tell us — we publish what we correct.