My life is entirely commanded by school, grades and homework. The best tool in my arsenal in waging war against the ever-encroaching Bs: the online gradebook. Once a quick, simple task, checking my grades online has turned into a battlefield of its own with the switch to the new online gradebook this year.

According to Michael Gavin, freshman class principal, a few years ago, the district switched to Infinite Campus for the storage of student information such as contact information, free and reduced lunch status and gifted status. Information was supposed to smoothly transfer between the Infinite Campus and the older system for grades, Pinnacle, but this never quite happened the way it was intended.

Pinnacle was going to update this year anyway, so changes would have happened even if we had not switched over to Infinite Campus. So it made sense to the administration to review our online gradebook and they decided to make the switch.

When I want to check my grades, I don’t need the website to tell me my legal name, gender and date of birth, as it does when you click on “Demographics.” While this in-depth information may be useful for the administration to have all in one place, the site could be so much more user-friendly if all the extra information was not there. Once you get through the unnecessary junk, the grades are organized by terms within the individual classes, which is just confusing. Each teacher has a different method of entering grades; some average the two quarters for the semester grade, and some keep a running tally of points for the entire semester. These different methods pop up in different ways in the term organization system, adding to the already sizable bewilderment to my daily (okay, sometimes hourly) online grade check.

And then there’s the grades for individual assignments that come up as points and percentages with no letter grade. Yes, they do give a chart for conversion, but this just takes up extra space and makes my already lengthy visit to check my grades even longer.
Before the switch, I averaged two or three minutes making sure my grades were all in order. But now, I spend closer to ten minutes trying to decode the website. Yes, this time will decrease as I get better at deciding what I need to look at, but at the moment it is a process full of frustrations.

I do appreciate that Infinite Campus has an app, which I have on my iPod. I love that it gives me notifications. The app is, however, just as hard to navigate and as filled with unnecessary information as the website.

For now, it looks as though the enemy is winning. But, even when I’m close to defeat, I’ll persevere in the face of the confusing gradebook.