While I have never used grading software before, I can see that it is going to be much easier than calculating grades with a calculator and gradebook and the level of communication between parents and teachers is much better because the internet connects them with minimal effort on either persons part.
I really liked that engrade allows you to connect, through e-mail, with your students and their parents. Both parents and kids spend so much time on the computer these days that any way you can make it easier for them to access grade information and keep them aware of assignments that are missing, etc. is terrific.
After talking to my husband about this program, I now understand that the inability to merge different grading spreadsheets is a problem. For example, my husband explained that his second quarter grades are 80% weighted along with the 20% weight of the midterm. This only happens in one quarter in the entire year. In Engrade, when you change the weighting for one quarter it changes it for all of the quarters so you cannot specifically apply that change to one quarter only.
I also found out that when you have entered many grades for a whole quarter there is no “bulk fill” choice so what you have to do is go through the whole thing and manually enter zeros or “excuseds.” It was a bit time consuming.
I really liked that engrade allows you to connect, through e-mail, with your students and their parents. Both parents and kids spend so much time on the computer these days that any way you can make it easier for them to access grade information and keep them aware of assignments that are missing, etc. is terrific.
After talking to my husband about this program, I now understand that the inability to merge different grading spreadsheets is a problem. For example, my husband explained that his second quarter grades are 80% weighted along with the 20% weight of the midterm. This only happens in one quarter in the entire year. In Engrade, when you change the weighting for one quarter it changes it for all of the quarters so you cannot specifically apply that change to one quarter only.
I also found out that when you have entered many grades for a whole quarter there is no “bulk fill” choice so what you have to do is go through the whole thing and manually enter zeros or “excuseds.” It was a bit time consuming.
This program is great because it allows communication but needs some of the more advanced features of the well-established grading programs for it to be able to compete and really make computerized grading easy, efficient, and accurate for teachers.
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