How StepUp works
Every recommendation a student or counselor sees is produced by the same deterministic engine, no black box, no model drift. Here is exactly what goes into each score.
The pipeline
Assess
A 48-item Holland RIASEC inventory, 8 items per dimension on a 5-point Likert scale, interleaved so no dimension is answered in a block.
Score
Answers are averaged per dimension and normalised to 0–100. Progress auto-saves after every item, and completed attempts are kept as history.
Match
Fit, Readiness, Feasibility and Confidence combine into one deterministic match score. The same inputs always produce the same ranking.
Plan
Top matches become a branching roadmap with Safe, Balanced and Ambitious pathways, plus milestones students can add to My Path.
The four scores
A match score is a weighted blend of Fit, Readiness and Feasibility. Confidence weights the whole result and is always shown alongside it.
Fit
40% of the match scoreHow closely a career's Holland profile matches the student's RIASEC results.
- Each career carries an ordered Holland affinity (e.g. Investigative → Realistic → Conventional).
- The student's dimension score is weighted by position: 1st affinity ×1.00, 2nd ×0.82, 3rd ×0.64.
- The weighted total is divided by the maximum possible total and expressed as 0–100.
Readiness
30% of the match scoreWhether current grades and coursework support the pathway today.
- Current GPA is compared against the career's minimum GPA band.
- Completed prerequisite courses add credit; missing ones subtract it.
- Recent-term trend nudges the score up or down so improvement is rewarded.
Feasibility
20% of the match scoreHow realistic the path is given time left in school and pathway difficulty.
- Grade level sets how many terms remain to finish prerequisites.
- Each pathway variant (Safe, Balanced, Ambitious) carries its own difficulty cost.
- Careers requiring more remaining terms than a student has are ranked lower, never hidden.
Confidence
10%, and a reliability flagHow much evidence sits behind the recommendation.
- Completeness: share of the 48 RIASEC items answered.
- Differentiation: how clearly the top dimensions separate from the rest, flat profiles score lower.
- Engagement: response variety, so straight-lining an entire inventory reduces confidence.
What we guarantee
Deterministic
Identical answers and grades always produce identical scores. Results are reproducible for any counselor review.
Explainable
Every score can be traced back to specific items, courses and weights, students see why a career ranked where it did.
Never prescriptive
Scores rank options and surface gaps. They do not gate a student out of any pathway or replace counselor judgement.
Retakes, history and data retention
Answers auto-save after every item, so a closed tab never loses progress. A completed inventory locks retakes for 30 days, interest profiles are stable over short windows, and the lock keeps year-over-year comparisons meaningful. Every completed attempt is kept in history with its Holland code, confidence and date, so growth over high school is visible to both the student and their counselor.