I was a high school teacher at an alternative school. Most of our students had struggled at some point in their lives, in a way that had impacted their learning

I was a high school teacher at an alternative school. Most of our students had struggled at some point in their lives, in a way that had impacted their learning. So they came to us with transcripts that were all over the place: for example some had finished all their math credits but had failed all their social studies classes. Many had earned partial credit in some areas. This made academic advising difficult for a variety of reasons. One big reason was the fact that all transcripts were text based. To figure out where a student stood academically, you had to take a pen and mark up their transcript, totaling their credits in different areas, in order to see which graduation requirements they had met and which they still needed to fulfill. I wrote a program that parsed every student's text-based transcript, and generated a visual transcript for each student. What used to take 15-30 minutes for each student now took about 30 seconds. You could look at one of these documents and see exactly where a student's strengths were, in what areas they had struggled, and most importantly what they still needed to do in order to graduate. It wasn't just a time-saver. The main benefit was that those 15-30 minutes that used to be spent parsing a transcript, with fingers crossed that no one was making a mistake, were now spent focused on formulating a plan that students could buy into and feel confident about. I wrote that tool during some inservice days where my very cooperative principal let me skip out on boring repetitive trainings to focus on building the tool. I was able to build something I could run in that time, but it would have taken a lot longer to build a general-purpose tool that they could run indefinitely after I left. I haven't looked in a while, but I hope that some of the companies that handle student records have built these kinds of tools into their software. There was some movement in that direction last time I checked.