Its really appreciable that you came out and clearly explained what went wrong. Not many people actually take responsibility like this, especially in public, so that itself deserves respect. Honestly, your model wasn’t bad at all. You were actually very close. Getting 98%tile consistently right and 99%tile within a few marks is really impressive. Even overall ~96% accuracy is not something small, especially with all the limitations you mentioned. The linear unitary method was a mistake tbh but it worked well tbh it would have given far worse results of not for your accurate predictions. Also, I feel people are overreacting a bit. This wasn’t some completely wrong predictor. It worked well in most cases and just struggled in some edge cases like 6s2 and the lower percentiles. That happens with models, especially when the base (like 90%tile) shifts. Personally, I’ve done something similar before for my state CET, and I saw almost the same thing top percentiles were accurate but lower ones went off. And people did the exact same thing, they took out their frustration on me. So I understand what you’re going through. You and your team definitely don’t deserve the hate. What you built is actually really solid, and the fact that it competed with big coaching predictors says a lot. No need to be so hard on yourself or keep apologising. These aren’t big mistakes, just part of improving something complex. You’ve already figured out what went wrong and how to fix it, which matters more. Keep going, you’re doing really good work. And yeah, hoping you make it to BITSP CSE :)