Report card templates for each grading period

Casey Walters

Does anyone use a separate report card template for each grading period? Support has advised me against it, but I'm not sure why other than having 16 templates to keep track of. It seems like once the template is set up, I can just make a copy of each one during our annual rollover. We grade quarterly and I find it very tedious to update and easy to overlook every location I have to update the Grading Period each quarter. I don't like not being able to retrieve historical grade information without saving a PDF of each one.

Scott Chrysler

Casey -


We have a separate template for each grade report. Though it is more inconvenient for the school, we believe it greatly benefits the parents and students for a simple reason: they are able to maintain access to all of their grades and comments for each reporting period. To achieve this previously, the grade report needed to be cumulative. So by the time the end of year rolled along, grade reports were 14 pages long. Student and parents had to search for the "current" comment which many had trouble finding even though they were labelled with the marking period. Now we have a template for each quarter. We report the grades in one cumulative section so students and parents can track improvement or decline and have the comments for just that reporting reporting period in the next block. We have actually received compliments on how easy they are to read.


Hope that helps.


Happy Friday.


All the best,

Scott

Casey Walters

This is fantastic feedback Scott. Thank you so much! That is an added bonus that it will cut down on the number of pages. I thought the three and four pagers we got up to last year were out of hand.

Brian Gray

We also use a different template for each report card. We report grades and/or comments 6 times per year, and we have two divisions. We als have to maintain a couple of templates for withdrawn students

That means that we have to tweak at least 12 templates when we make a design change.

But it also allows us to display only the grades that we want to display. We report mid-term grades as a progress report, but they are not permanent or official. The grade at the end of the term is what matters. So after the fall term grade is reported, we no longer report the fall progress grade on the winter or spring report cards. (Of course, the student or parent can go back to the fall mid-term report card to see it. Removing the fall mid-term grade from the subsequent report cards helps to emphasize that it was a “snapshot in time” grade that is not used in future calculations.

Casey Walters

Thank you so much! This is incredibly helpful.