Engrade Review

After signing up and reviewing this web site, I think it is really confusing.  I don't think this is a software that I would choose to use as a teacher in real life.  I like the fact that it is easy to manually enter the names of the students and the number of assignments, as well as how much of the final grade percentage each assignment will be worth.  It is also a nice feature to be able to drop the lowest grade.

However, all of those nice features do not make the site any less confusing.  I have been playing around with the web site for hours and have still not been able to figure out how to enter grades for what each student would have earned on the assignments, so I can not even utilize any of the grade calculation aspects of the web site.

My suggestion would be to make the program more user friendly and maybe have a tutorial for teachers on how to use it.  It needs to be more clearly labeled what each section is worth and how to properly use each section of the web site. 

If a teacher can actually fight with the program long enough to actually figure out how to use it, I can understand why a program like this one would be useful to students and teachers.  The ability for parents to see their child's grades can be helpful in being proactive and contacting the teacher before any severe academic problems arise with their children.  I know a lot of students who receive poor grades often either attempt to hide them from their parents, or do not tell their parents right away.  The ability for a parent to be able to log on and see their child's grade regardless of if they actually show them their classwork or not.

Below is a picture of a grading matrix I attempted to create.  It includes the assignments I created and how much of the final grade each assignment was worth.  Unfortunately I was unable to figure out how to enter grades, so I was unable to experiment with what comes next as far as the grading process.