When low scores don't tell the full story: A Composite indicator of student achievement

This paper introduces a new composite indicator of student achievement, grounded in an axiomatic framework. Unlike conventional measures that assign equal weight to all subjects, our index applies student and subject specific weights, placing greater emphasis on areas where a student performs well. This allows for a more individualized assessment, recognizing strengths in non-core subjects like music, sports, or social sciences. Using test score data from 44,173 students studying in 117 private English medium schools in rural North India, we compare our indices with the traditional average score index. The results show that a substantial proportion of students initially ranked in the bottom quartile move up significantly under our metric, highlighting overlooked talent. The proposed indices CS1 and CS2 markedly increase mean scores from 0.696 (under the original index CS0) to 0.838 and nearly 1.0, respectively, while sharply reducing standard deviations from 1.88 to 0.129 and 0.017.