Hello. My daughter will be a freshman in the fall. I am able to check her grades online with a program her school uses called Genesis. Sh seems to be slacking a little bit and she doesn’t mind if I check her grades periodically.
My question is if a student is able to login in online during a semester to check the progress of their grades? Do college professors post grades/assignments online all throughout the semester? Or, do you have to wait until midterm/final exam to figure out how you are doing (your exact average).
My daughter is thinking about living on campus her freshman year. She won’t have mom there reminding her not to slack off. Since I will be paying an additional $14,000 a year to live on campus, I don’t want to find out at the end of the marking period she slacked off freshman year because I know for sure if she lived at home there would be a less chance of this happening.
My daughter said that if she went away, she would not mind me checking her grades even though she will be checking them. High school is FREE, while I will be paying for her to stay on campus. While she is learning to manage her time, I do not want any surprises at the end of the marking period.
So my question is if students have a way to check grades all throughout the semester?
Most colleges at this point use some type of learning management system (usually Canvas or Blackboard). Whether every instructor uses it, or uses it to its full potential, is another question.
That said, even if the up-to-date grades are not posted online, assuming the instructor/TA turns around tests/projects, etc. in a timely basis, simple arithmetic will allow her (but obviously not you) to figure out her current grade.
We have not been checking grades for our daughters during the semester. My personal opinion is that a major part of university is for our kids to learn to be independent and responsible and live on their own. I see university as sort of like an expensive half way house between living with parents versus living on their own.
I was just as concerned about our kids potentially sleeping in and missing classes. We did buy each a good alarm clock that was easy to adjust to different times for each day.
We did have 18 years in each case to try to instill a sense of responsibility in our kids. Now we get to see whether we have succeeded.
And yes, this is a bit scary. In our case, and in most cases, it does seem to work out okay.
Thank you. Do your kids have a way to check their grades online, or are they left in the dark until the end of the semester? Do professors post grades for assignments online or do they have to wait until the very end of the semester to see how they are doing?
Skieurope, thank you for your response! I was wondering if professors actually used some kind of online tool with current average throughout the semester. I would like my daughter to be able to keep track of how she is doing throughout the semester. Her current high school pre calculus teacher has only posted 3 grades online so far and the marking period ends in 5 days. So the day before the marking period ends, she will post 10-15 grades all at one, just like she did first marking period.
@eastcoaster1 There is no real answer to this. Some professors will make this data available, other won’t. My D is currently a junior at a large public university. I know that she has full info in some classes and knows exactly how she is doing, but last semester she continually expressed frustration with one class where nothing was graded or returned in a timely manner. She went into the final uncertain with where she stood in the class and grades for both the final and the previous test showed up in the online portal at the same time. Just because the university has a system, doesn’t mean every professor is going to use it.
My daughter’s school uses Blackboard. Some profs are great at updating grades, others not so much. One of her classes curves at the end of the semester so all the students ever knew was how they did in relation to the curve. Other classes give “projected grades”. One of her classes only posted one grade before the final.
Students are able to authorize their parents as users to access grades but I didn’t feel the need to do that since my daughter called after every assignment/lab/quiz/test to tell me how she did.
yes, they generally have a on online portal that grades are shown.
My DD even had to complain to the Head of Dept for one prof who was not grading and then posting the grades in a timely fashion (weeks behind.)
As I said, it depends. My college uses Canvas, but not instructors use it to its full potential. It’s usually fairly updated for large classes with multiple TAs needing to access/update. However, most of my classes are small, with one TA, or none. If the instructor does not use the LMS, then I assume s/he’s using an Excel spreadsheet or Google Doc or an old wirebound gradebook. To me, it does not matter as long as the final grade gets posted on time. As I said, if I was truly interested mid-semester, I could do the math myself. But it would also be, for me, an exercise in futility, since the final exam/project is often a large part of the final grade, and there is no real way of estimating the final curve, as only the final grade is curved (if it is at all), not the components.
My kids usually knew how they were doing without going online. I didn’t ask, but when there was a problem, I would find out about it directly from my son or daughter when I visited.
I do remember back in the day before Al Gore invented the internet that you would get back graded papers and tests to see how you were doing. I am sure most universities have some sort of online grading system. And I am sure some professors won’t be up to date all the time.
But please kill me if I am checking my D19’s grades when she gets to college. I sure hope I have better things to do with my time.
That being said I will instill plenty of fear in my D19 that if she screws up life back home will not be much fun.
We never checked student college grades during the terms online. It never crossed our minds to do that.
BUT we did set some criteria for our kids. Both had merit awards, and we made it very clear that if they lost these awards, they would be leaving their expensive colleges to come home and commute to something less costly. We also let them know that we expected a 3.0 GPA or better all the time (which was what the college expected for merit award recipients) or they would be welcomed home.
No D or F grades…at all. Not acceptable.
And we would not pay for retaking if failed or D grade courses…kids could pay for that.
Our kids can check their college grades but they usually are only accurate through midterm. After that, stuff doesn’t always get entered. I’m sure some profs are better about it than others but I only hear about when they aren’t.
Personally, as parents, we don’t check grades. The kids had/have scholarships and financial aid that requires a certain gpa for renewal. They loose funding, they simply can’t go to their pricey private schools.
UC-Berkeley uses a few different ones. Gradescope is used pretty commonly, along with numerous other top schools. They also have an internal in-house one that is pretty cool - for the famed CS61A class there was a module written by a student that even told you what score you needed on the final in order to get a certain grade. The calculation is pretty tricky, not as easy as one might think, because of all the little homework assignments and extra credit opportunities of which there is a cap.
I think all you can assume is that you can have an idea at the end of the first semester. We have kids sign ferpa and outline that if the semester is a true bust, no more OOS residential college options are available. Kids will have to commute to a local 4 yr (close) or have a great plan B. My issue is less the tuition than the living costs and meal plan. That is the true indulgence that needs earning for me.
My two kids’ experience with this has varied, and both had some kind of blackboard online thing where they (not me) could check progress. Some professors put everything there. some put almost nothing. Some used it for homework assignments or quizzes and then posted the grades, some didn’t.
IMO it was very frustrating for them at first to adapt to not always knowing how they were doing as they moved through the semester’s work. S left college after a year, D learned to be in very regular contact with her professors. Even so she is still sometimes surprised by a final grade, up or down. In part because final exams/papers are so big a factor and those aren’t usually known until the final grade comes out.
I think high schools breed this expectation that grades will be updated daily, or at least weekly. This is not typical on the college level. Just like how in the world of post-college work, most employees are not getting a daily performance review, most college classes are not going to provide a daily snapshot. At the college where I work, there is an official midterm grade at the seven week mark and an official final grade. Professors can choose to have a gradebook on Blackboard (the learning management system) which they keep up to date or not.
I am in broad agreement with @gpo613 . Students had ways to determine their grades in the pre-internet era, and students should be able to do so now. Most first year-leveled classes (like ENG 101, BIO 101, PSY 101, SPA 1101, first year seminars, etc.) have multiple low-to-medium stakes assignments which get a letter grade. The syllabus should have a formula showing how each assignment is weighted. For example, in my ENG 1101 class, there are five essays worth 10%, 10%, 10%, 15%, and 30% of the grade. I hand them back within a week. There is a letter grade on each one and extensive comments. If a student has gotten a B-, a B, and an A-, on the first three equally weighted essays, that student should be able to figure out that his/her cumulative grade is in the high B territory with or without a learning management system doing the math. There is also an oral presentation worth 10% of the grade. Again, these are graded within a week with extensive comments. The only part that might be a mystery is class participation (15%), and even there, I would think a student would have some idea of “How has my attendance been? Am I an active participant in class discussions and activities? Do I show up prepared for my 1-on-1 meetings with the professor?”
College professors aren’t trying to be mysterious and we give as much feedback as we can, but we also expect students to take some ownership for tracking their own progress, thus starting them on the road to the professional world of work!
There are all different answers to that question - but I make a condition of my paying that certain intervals the grades are shared with me however they may be accomplished is up to the student.
Maybe I am missing something, but is there any reason why you need to check the grades yourself? My kids would just occasionally mention their grades. (I didn’t know my daughter had a 4.0 until she told us she was graduating summa, but I assumed she was doing well.)
If you are concerned that your daughter might slack off, can you just ask her “Do you have at least a B average in all your classes?” every so often? I think that’s what I’d do if I had a concern about a kid with the potential to jeopardize a scholarship.
Even if there’s no scholarship to be concerned about, getting bad grades the first semester might be enough to shame her into studying harder. My first semester grades were awful, and that caused me to knuckle under and develop better habits.
My D’s at a top LAC – just one semester in but so far not a lot of online grade reporting and seems to be heavy emphasis on finals as largest contributor to overall grade. She voluntarily told me about major tests/papers throughout, and sometimes I asked just generally how she was doing.
The college emphasized during orientation that parents are never sent grades. Students are adults and it’s up to parent/child to work out how and when that information is shared. Yes, we’re paying but the college is not going to involve the parents as part of the loop – big change from HS, of course.
I think if a student is in academic probation there might be a safety valve to notify parents, but honestly not even sure about that.
The wall pertains to other areas too, fyi, like health services. Turning 18 really does change things!