PowerSchool is a web-based student information system, supporting 13 million students in all 50 states and over 65 countries. Since its introduction in 1997, PowerSchool has grown to become the most widely-used student information system available, offering a high number of features to those in K-12 education. PowerSchool enables educators to make timely decisions that impact student performance while creating a collaborative environment for parents, teachers and students to interact with each other and with important class data and statistics.

Overall, PowerSchool provides a full range of features needed by administrators at the district and school level in addition to portals for teachers, parents, and students. An intuitive GUI and breadth of gradebook options gives instructors power in their grading and the ability to easily share results.

Good Features:

• Nicely developed and intuitive GUI
• Widely used, and therefore widely supported
• Views for instructor, student, parent, and school administration, with proper data encapsulation
• Authentication of IDs through IdP (SAML)
• Assignment categories section allows for the addition of custom assignments beyond standard Homework, Project, Quiz, etc.
• Summary statistics provided per class (mean, median, mode) along with automatic report generation
• Option to provide comments to individual students on every input assignment
• History of grades and attendance available to students/parents
• Student info section gives detailed information on each student enrolled
• Web-based but not "browser-constrained", can run in offline mode

Bad Features:

• Not highly flexible, many forms have set value options
• Underdeveloped late policy options
• Limited assignment scoring options (raw score or completed)
• Many features are geared towards a high school administration and may not be relevant

Missing Features:

• Class curving/weighting options
• Online assignment submission
• Messaging/email service between instructor and students
• Sophisticated filtered viewing
• Grade prediction