Simple rules for posting online grades

From the Orlando Sentinal story "Online gradebooks earn A for info, F for stress":

Foster Starks checks his grades most every day on his phone, logging into a website where teachers at Celebration High post marks for tests, papers and other assignments.

The 18-year-old senior likes that the online grade book helps him keep tabs on how he's doing. But the constant checking and the occasional unnerving mark — whether it's a flubbed quiz or a grade entered in error — "induces a lot of stress," he said.

In most schools, online grade sites have replaced traditional grade books, and unlike the books once kept in a teacher's desk, the Internet versions are available to parents and students most anytime.

They aid parents looking to help their kids keep on top of schoolwork, alerting them to problems in real time, long before a printed report card would go home. But the ability to see grades 24/7 can fuel parental hovering and student anxiety.

....

Matt, now a 10th-grader at Lake Brantley High, and his parents still check Skyward regularly.

"Obviously, I may not enjoy it. I recognize it's probably a good thing," he said.

What irks him, though, is when his parents see a bad grade and then text or call to say, "What went wrong here?"

Often, he doesn't know because the grades are online before the teacher has handed back the test.

...

A common complaint from students and parents is that the sites are not up to date.

We've had a parent/student portal into our InfiniteCampus grade book since the 2004-05 school year. Adding apps that made the site accessible from a smartphone increased its usage. But we've also experienced the problems that the Sentinel article lists above: inconsistent or slow grade reporting, slow or nonexistent assignment posting, and reporting done online prior to work returned to students. The complaints from parents about these issues have decreased over the years, but they still crop up now and then.

Quite honestly, our district has not adopted any guidelines for teachers on the use of the online, student/parent accessible grade book. If anyone is to blame for poor implementation, it's me as tech director for not being more firm about setting such guidelines.

I don't think they need to be too complicated:

1. Each school will adopt a reasonable expectation of teacher posting assignments, grades, and other information in the online gradebook and make sure those expectations are clearly communicated in the parent, student, and teacher handbooks. (For example, all assignments will be posted no later than one week before they are due and no grades will be posted later than five days after the assignment has been turned in.)
2. No grades on assignments will be posted until after the original work with grade and comment is returned to the student.
3. All teachers will follow these guidelines in a consistent manner with gradebook use being an item included in teacher evaluations. 

Again, rule #1 above is best developed at the building level by the teaching staff, but once agreed upon, needs to rapidly become part of the building culture - an expectation of all teachers, period.

Does your building or district have any sample rules for teacher using parent/student accessible gradebooks?

See also: Parent portals: are we encouraging helicopter parenting? 

Comments

[Kenn Gorman]

I recall dealing with both "helicopter" parents and "stealth fighter" parents, and often times these communications are directly related to a posting in the grade book. I have even had a parent come in and ask me why her student is getting an F in my class after seeing a zero or missing listed in ONE assignment.

I guess there needs to be some middle ground between "wait three months" and "know every minute".

I do often wonder if the students who say they don't know their current grade really don't know...