Afisena
Mandarin tutoring in Indonesia has a difficulty other subjects do not: the starting points inside one class are too far apart.
In the same room there is a child who understands it at home but cannot write it, a child who recognises the characters but has never used them to speak, and a child who enrolled from nothing. Moving through a syllabus week by week suits none of the three.
Split the content, not the class
Most centres answer this by running separate classes, and the cost becomes unbearable quickly at a small centre: three levels means three timetables, three sets of material, three time slots, and a package of trouble every time a child needs to change level halfway.
The alternative is one course whose content branches on mastery. What is tracked is how far each student has got with each piece, updated whenever they answer something — not from exam scores, but from what they got right.
That produces two thresholds: below 0.45 counts as needing to be redone, above 0.75 counts as skippable. Both can be adjusted.
For Mandarin tutoring, the upper threshold is often worth more than the lower. A child who speaks Mandarin at home should not be asked to redo pinyin basics. They will do it, and then begin to feel the class is not for them.
Listening, speaking, reading, writing is not one number
Better said than hidden: a mastery figure is an estimate drawn from a pattern of answers, and answering is mostly reading and writing.
So it is reasonably sensitive to "can write this character" and "recognises this word", and practically blind to how fluently a child speaks. Assessing speech stays the teacher's work — and that matters particularly here, because spoken ability is often the thing parents actually care about.
Use the number to group students and choose material. Do not use it as an assessment.
Where machine marking stops for characters
Multiple choice is marked instantly. Short answers are matched against a key, and one question can hold several keys that are all accepted — which matters for Mandarin, where one meaning often has more than one legitimate written form.
Written answers always wait for a person. While any remains unmarked, that student has no mark at all — not zero, none. That is an advantage when reporting to parents: a cell meaning "not marked yet" does not read as "scored nothing".
Cost the speech feature before using it
If you plan to use text-to-speech for listening material, it is charged at 2 credits per character. A two-hundred-character passage is around 400 credits.
Work it out on paper first: how many passages a week, how many a month, and whether that still fits your allowance. The free plan is 5,000 credits a month; Personal is 15,000. Listening material is the AI feature most likely to overrun an allowance unnoticed, because it is charged per character rather than per use.
A starting point you can act on
- Open one course on the free plan with a single unit in it. The free plan holds 20 students, which is usually a class.
- Set enrolment to code: the syllabus is visible in the catalogue, and only the people you gave the code to get in. Parents can see what is taught before enrolling.
- Adjust both mastery thresholds to your actual students, especially the upper one.
- Think about your own domain later, when you start printing leaflets.