Nobody is licensed to practise medicine because they attended the lectures. You demonstrate what you can do, to an examiner who does not work for the school that taught you, and the school's opinion of you is not the thing that decides it.
That arrangement is a century old, it is not controversial, and education has never had it. A school assesses its own pupils and issues its own verdict — and then everyone downstream, quite reasonably, discounts it.
Mastery-based microschools feel this more sharply than anyone. They are the schools most likely to be teaching something real — a pupil who can actually explain what a system of equations means, who has built the thing, done the work, defended it — and least able to prove it to a parent deciding whether to enroll or a funder deciding whether to write the cheque. Their evidence is the best and their paperwork is the weakest.
JitGuru is the missing half: independent subject-matter experts who judge a pupil's real work against the standard that pupil's own school set. Not our standard. We are the noticeboard, not the examiner.
I'm a physician. I've spent twenty-five years writing software for problems that resist it, and I hold a teaching certificate — which mostly means I've had the argument about assessment from three sides instead of one.
The idea is not mine. It's the one my own profession settled long ago, and it works: independent adjudication is what makes a qualification mean something to a stranger. Microschools are the place in education where it is most obviously missing and most obviously needed.
When several evaluators judge the same pupil, someone has to turn their results into the single answer a mastery model needs. Every rule for doing that takes a pedagogical position — is five of nine a pass? does ambiguity default to fail? That position belongs to the school that set the standard. So you do it, and we record that you did.
No star ratings, no scores, no "best match". We publish facts: how many an has judged, across how many schools, since when. Which of them meets your bar is your judgment, because your standard is the one that counts. A five-star average would be a verdict we have no standing to reach.
Vetting an adult who works with children is your legal obligation, and in most places the law is specific about it: the record has to reach the school from the issuing authority itself, not through the applicant and not through us. Evaluators apply for openings that describe the pupil-evaluation requirement. An opening clearly states when a security check is required. The evaluator has it sent to the school directly, and the school records that it arrived.
Evaluators are paid directly by the schools they work for, in full. Schools pay one flat JitGuru subscription.