Halfway through last year, I started using an online grading system – Engrade. Initially, I was really impressed with the system. My teaching roommate was looking for a way to make his grades available for students to check at home, and this seemed to fit the bill.

Recently, I read about some problems that people had with the site last fall (before I started using it). As the Spring progressed, I had also experienced some problems – although nothing like what other people experienced. I found that at times the site was slow (especially during the schoolday), and sometimes the servers would be overwhelmed and they would just reject requests until traffic slowed down.

I still like the idea, though, and I didn’t have time to research/find an alternative, so I began the year using the same system.  So far?  So good.

Connection Issues

Last year, there would routinely be times when I had trouble connecting to the site. The administrators of Engrade said they had updated their server capacity, but I didn’t notice a lot of improvement last year.

This year, things are much better. Every once in a while, I attempt to enter a value into the book and I get an error that the connection was lost. These isolated issues might be due to the crappiness of our school network, I’m not sure. But, I haven’t experienced any kind of blanket blackouts. I’ve used it to take attendance just about every day in every class (early morning, mid afternoon, late afternoon), and it’s always worked at an acceptable speed.

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One thing I noted in my initial review (and that some people may be concerned about) is that Engrade is supported through advertisements. They previously showed a small block of Google Adsense ads to students, while these ads were not served up to people logged in as teachers.

That policy seems to have changed slightly, and I now see the ads on my teacher account. It doesn’t bother me much, and I’ve never heard students complain about it. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s some kind of philosophical problem – but nothing is really “free,” and this seems like a small price to pay.

Backups

Even if you’ve got 100% confidence in a system (like Engrade), you had better back up your data. There’s always a fluke chance that something will go wrong, and you don’t want to be stuck at the end of a marking cycle with no grades in your book…

This isn’t too hard to do.  While you’re viewing your gradebook, there’s an option titled “Export to Excel.” This exports all of the data as a .csv file – which stands for comma separated values. It’s not in an actual Excel spreadsheet. The info is sorted into a standard filetype that can be opened and formatted by any spreadsheet/database program. The data won’t be quite as pretty as it was in Engrade, but it will all be there – with the overall grade, each assignment, and each grade for each student for each assignment.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, though. I wish there was an option on the site to export all of your active gradebooks. This would make the backup process less time consuming. I’m wondering if I could write an online script that would access your gradebook, retrieve the csv file, and e-mail it to you…

Printing the Gradebook…

This is my biggest pet peeve about Engrade, and probably the only reason I would consider going to another system. At the end of the year, I’m required to hand in a hard copy of my gradebook.

While you can print out your gradebook, there’s no simple way to print out the whole thing. The online chart only shows 8 assignments at a time, and you need to print each page of the gradebook separately. Last year, that took me a good hour or two to print out the reports for my last two semesters.

This year, I’m going to see if it’s easier to export the gradebook to Excel, slap some formatting on it, and print it out that way. If it is, I’ll post up how to do that. But I wish Engrade had a standard way to print out all of your active gradebooks… or at the very least to print out the entire gradebook for one class.

Bottom Line – Good, Bad, Ugly?

I’m still quite pleased with the system. My students love it. If they don’t physically see the grades, they often have no concept of what they’ve done, what they haven’t done, and what grade they’re getting in the class. This fixes that problem straight off.

It’s hard to argue with a poor grade when 90% of the assignments are labeled “Missing.” It also gives them a clear roadmap to improve that grade – handing in all those missing assignments.

There are some minor pet peeves that annoy me (only being able to export/backup one gradebook at a time, not being able to print the gradebooks easily), but these are outweighed by the positives. This year, I’ve had no trouble with connections, and I’m confident that my data is secure. I’ve had more problems in the past with (almost) losing papers, flash drives, and dead hard drives.

With that in mind, I’m happy to leave my main gradebook on a secured cloud server, and let them worry about not losing it.