Grade passback is a pain point for educators and school systems. Just go online and look up the help desk for popular grading platforms and you’ll notice the cries for help from users:
“Anybody have a solution for passing a midterm and final letter grade to their SIS?”
“Who is having problems with grade passback?”
We all know that technology is supposed to save teachers time. But instead of restoring time, sharing grades to the gradebook or student information system (SIS) is stealing time—a teacher’s most valuable commodity. Uploading class rosters by spreadsheet or even manually entering records one at a time erases time for teachers who would rather be using that time to teach.
Here’s just one example: A district in Utah with 35,000 students reports that its teachers send an average of 50,000 results per week back to their SIS. That’s a massive amount of data that admins want posted in real time.
The importance of grade passback
Why is it important to share grades instantly across systems? School districts have been transitioning to a digital environment, and the more they go down that path, the more they depend on applications to deliver content and performance data.
As Melissa Loble, vice president of platform and partnerships at Instructure explains, “Technology has given us an opportunity to utilize data in order to identify the best methods for driving student engagement and creating impactful learning opportunities that might not otherwise be available.”
Technology also extends education’s reach. As education and tech become even more intricately entwined in the classroom and on our screens, we must also have responsive administrative systems.
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