Built by a psychologist. Designed around the work.
Dr. Valentine’s PsychLab brings together free report-writing tools, fictional demonstrations and custom development for psychologists and district teams. Kevin Valentine began with spreadsheets and formulas to reduce repetitive work, then developed the tools into software. AUTOMATA is the report-writing app in development; its release features are confirmed separately.
What we believe about a technical report.
makes
AUTOMATA
The thinking is the job. The typing isn't.
Interpreting a profile, weighing it against history and observation, deciding what it means for a student — that is professional judgment and it stays with the professional. Moving numbers from a score report into a table and from the table into sentences is not judgment. It is transcription, and transcription is where errors live.
A report is a legal document.
People sign their names to these. Eligibility decisions, services, and sometimes litigation rest on them. So a printed percentile from the publisher always beats a computed one, a descriptor always comes from the publisher's own band table, and a missing value is left blank and flagged rather than filled with something plausible.
Nothing runs without a yes.
Every automated check produces a proposal, not an action. You see what would change and approve it or reject it. Identifying data stays in your files. The system drafts on de-identified records and the report is re-assembled on your side.
School psychologist. Builder. He writes the reports this product was built for — and he got bored enough of writing them to build the thing that writes them for him.
Kevin Valentine, PhD, LEP, is a school psychologist at Mira Monte High School (Kern High School District). His caseload is initials, triennials, re-evaluations, and the eligibility meetings that follow — each ending in a report built from score PDFs, rating scales, priors, and records.
He got bored of the typing, not the work. Retyping printed scores, rebuilding the same tables, re-explaining the same descriptors. So he taught himself the stack: spreadsheet shortcuts, then descriptor-band formulas (publisher printed value always wins), then PDF extractors, then an app. It was tested on reports he was about to sign. That pipeline is AUTOMATA.
Looking for an evaluation or consultation? Visit Valentine Psychological Services for independent educational evaluations and psychoeducational testing, or professional consultation and report review for school psychologists.
His PhD (National University, JFK School of Psychology) was on face perception and the cross-race effect — different topic, same discipline: measurement, error, and what a number does and does not prove.
Why the "A"
The mark is an A drawn as a pen nib and a circuit trace: A for AUTOMATA, and the two things it joins together — the practitioner's hand and the machine that does the typing.
Where student data goes.
The short answer is that it stays with you. This is the long one.
It is read where it already lives.
Score reports, prior evaluations and rating scales are opened and read on your own computer, by software running on your machine. They are not uploaded to us. We do not receive them and we do not hold a copy, which means there is no account of ours for them to be exposed from.
The report is assembled on your side.
Tables, score graphs and the merged document are all built locally, against your own template, in your own folders. The finished report exists on your computer and wherever your district keeps it. It does not exist on our servers, because it was never sent to them.
A number we were never given cannot appear.
Every figure in a finished report traces back to the score sheet built from the source PDF. Anything that does not match is flagged rather than printed, and nothing is filled in because it looked plausible. That check runs no matter how the sentence around the number was drafted.
The rule underneath all three: identifying information has no reason to leave your machine, so it does not. If a feature ever needs outside help to phrase a sentence, what it will be handed is a de-identified summary — the area, and the finding your own software already computed — carrying no name, no date of birth, no school, no district and no identification number, with nothing retained once the sentence comes back. That is a design rule, not a setting you have to go and find.