GradeQuickSlow - A Sample of True In-School Correspondence, Offered without Commentary or Footnotes for non-Pedagogues

Dear Principal,

I know you always like to hear commentary, so here’s mine while I’m entering grades: GradeQuick seems to me to be Stone Age tech. I know we’ve got lots of technological (and other) needs, and I may be the only one who feels this way, but whenever I use it I feel stymied by a myriad of niggling inconveniences over and over again. If the question of “should we renew?” or “what do people think?” comes up, my answers are “no,” and “arrrgh.”

One quick illustration: even with GradeBook to GradeBook Copy (which is strangely inactive this year - finally sent our tech guy an inquiry today), there is no way to make commonsense changes (such adding tests, grade markings, or grade footnotes) just once. Always you have to make it to one of the four gradebooks, and then copy it.

I was driven off the deep end tonight by the effort to delete the Mean from my reports. I found an old e-mail that answered that question, but other programs (not grading programs – I have, alas, no alternate experience other than my wonderful old Excel spreadsheets: beautifully flexible, endlessly adventurous (i.e., always open to catastropic, unnoticed changes)), seem so much more intuitive and easy to grasp, unlike this sentence. Perhaps I just have more regular and long-lasting experience with them, but after two years and a bit, I still don’t like GradeQuick.

Thanks for listening to the vent,

J.