The term is over and you are ready to store grades in PowerSchool. That probably means a few things:
1) If you are storing grades, then you are using PowerTeacher Gradebook or PowerTeacher Pro where each course section is assigned a grade for the reporting term. This is in contrast to standards based grading where there are many grades being offered for a single course section.
2) Your teachers have confirmed that their grades are complete in their gradebook. By storing grades, you are taking a snapshot of their gradebook for a single point in time. In order to update “historical” grades that have been permanently stored, you must repeat the process of grade storage again. In order to limit the number of re-stores you have to perform, ensure that all gradebooks are “frozen” before you store grades.
Step 1: Navigate to Home Page > School Management > Academics > Store Grades
Step 2: The Settings Page
You should now see a screen that looks like the one below. Although there are several sections available which could be important to you depending on how sophisticated you wish to be with your grades, we will only focus on the most common fields:
- Which Grades
- Exclude/Include Class Enrollments
- Classes by term length
Step 3: Which Grades
Use this Final Grade/Reporting Term: This is a two or three digit code that is defined in the Final Grade/Reporting Term Setup page in the School Setup. This represents the term that you wish to store from a PowerTeacher Gradebook or PT Pro perspective. The first character must be a letter and the following 1-2 digits must be numbers. Do NOT use the same store code for different terms in the same year.
Save with this Historical Store Code: This is usually the same as the Final Grade/Reporting Term code.
Step 4: Include/Exclude Class Enrollments
- Option 1: Use this option when you have a clear date for when a student enrolled in a course section will have their grade recorded. This can be useful if you want to only record grades when a student has spent a significant amount of time in the course. As an extreme example, a student that enters the school on the last day of school can have their grades ignored.
- Option 2: Use this option when you have a drop deadline for course sections after which a student cannot enroll in a course section and receive a grade for that term. This can be useful if you want to allow students to try out a course without any consequence of grades being recorded so long as they dropped the course before this deadline.
- Option 3: Use this option if you wish to store grades for all students enrolled in a course section on a specific date. This can be useful if you only wish to store grades for students that receive report cards on the last day of school. Note that the enrollment record must currently be active in order for the corresponding grade to store.
Step 5: Classes by term length
To properly fill this section out, you need to know the term length of your courses (year, semester, trimester, quarter, etc.). For the Store column, you will see three options:
- Option 1: Do not store
- This has no action associated with it. No grades will be stored for any course sections of the specified length.
- Option 2: Store with credit
- This is used if your school tracks credit associated with courses. The grade records will be stored with credit assignment. A value of 1 – 400 % of course credit must be associated with this store option.
- Option 3: Store with no credit
- Grades are stored but no credit is assigned.
Step 6: Submit and record the number of stored records
Once you have your stored grade options set and you press submit, you will have a screen that looks like this:
If you have stored grades for this term before, it is possible that you will have Stored Grades updated. If this is the first attempt, it will show “0 Stored Grades updated”. It is useful to record these numbers in case you wish to troubleshoot report cards or are advanced enough to make adjustments to the Stored Grades table in the DDA.
Great article