1.5.4. Gradelink

Gradelink gives teachers a wide variety of tools to monitor student progress and manage classes. It is a good tool for K-12 teachers/students, however this also means it isn't a good tool for college courses. While Gradelink offers a wide variety of features that allow interaction between a teacher and his or her students, it does not give a teacher much freedom in how they choose to organize items or other aspects of their class.

While Gradelink provides dozens of features, most of the features are useless for any college course. This isn't strictly a negative aspect, however it does mean that most features must be ignored.

• Teachers can upload attachments for assignments
• Class calendar to track upcoming assignments and due dates
• Keeps nearly all information relevant to a class in one place
• Tracks extra credit properly
• Students can use it to view their grades and their assignments

Bad Features:

• Displays a large amount of unnecessary information and bloats the UI with its features
• Hard to read statistics or analyze the "big picture"
• Weights grades by type of assignment and enforces strict categories on types
• Student attendance
• Summary reports (record cards and transcripts)
• Built for elementary schools and school districts

Missing Features:

• Statistical graphs about a class or several classes in a course at once
• Arranging and grouping items as a teacher sees fit; that is, allowing a teacher to have custom assignment types or arrange students into groups.
• Handling late assignments
• Students should be able to ask "what if" questions to see what would happen if they got a certain score on a test or check the averages they need to achieve a certain grade
• Tracking history of a course and its teachers