Marg PowerSchool

What I like best is the platform. PowerSchool Assessment makes cheating nearly impossible. Students are completely locked out of everything. If they leave the program for more than 10 seconds (cumulative the test locks.

Nearly everything else! I feel as if I am beta testing the earliest version of the software. However this is being used by my entire district. The navigation is terrible!

To view the test for my subjects

1 Click open to choose 9-12 math standards

2 Find & select Exams at the bottom of the page

3 Choose Post Test

This opens an alphabetical list of all of the schools in the district including elementary, middle, & high.

4 Find and select my school.

This opens a list of all of the math tests saved in my school's folder.

(This process is also needed in the Testing Center tab to assign & administer a test and then again in the Reporting to review the results

PowerSchool Assessment takes tedious to another level.

Finding items to include on an exam is even more difficult. Items are found within standards. Some standards have 2000+ results. (Because of the 9-12 standards. There are limited filters that do little to help with selection. The filter lacks keyword, subject, & grade level options. The questions include naming conventions and symbols display DOK & question type. However, there is no way to preview the question without selecting or using the review items menu that displays items one at a time.

Writing items is also a difficult process. There are only 5 types of questions; fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, hot spot (multiple select, drag drop, and constructed response. PowerSchool Assessment requires the user to determine the layout of the question in the first step and this cannot be changed without starting over. Images can be uploaded, however size of the image cannot be adjusted after upload. This leads to another major issue, concerning image size. Some of the images displayed during testing are too small for students to use. This wouldn't be a major issue in most situations, but in testing mode PowerSchool Assessment prevents zooming. Another issue is limited support for entering equations. Students have access to an equation editor in constructed response, but not in fill-in-the-blank.

My colleagues and I have been disappointed in the provided content. Many of the questions "seem" like good questions until you look closer. The difficulty lies in the wording and not the actual content. It is easy to write a tricky assessment item that is difficult. It is difficult to write a quality question that requires deeper thinking.

I think this program will be great, but the key word here is WILL. It's just not ready for the consumer.

This program has basically eliminated cheating.

The grading system is pretty standard. It's nice that it keeps you from awarding more points than an assignment is worth. (You can't award 1000 points for a 100 point assignment.

Attempting to use the PowerSchool online testing feature was a total disaster. I could not retrieve the grades after the assessment was taken by my students. I spoke to tech support, but no solution was found. A month passed and I had to exempt all students from a major test in my class at the end of the term.

Don't get it. Choose another product.

PowerSchool, like every other product of this type, lets parents and teachers connect and monitor grades. It is completely indistinguishable from its competitors in what it does well and is particularly bad at what it does bad.

I do like the easy grading. It is nice because it adds everything up for you. I also love the easy attendance.

Oh trying to access the garbed is awful! It keeps asking me to reload and it has already been loaded. It's a waste of my valuable time!

Make it EASIER to access Gradebook!! It is ridiculous!

It solves the problem of paperwork in not having to have a hard copy of attendance. When I DO access the gradebook, it totals everything up and is really nice.

Figures the grades and it is fairly easy to add new grades in and copy them across classes.

Poor user interface. Multiple open windows or programs necessary. (Minimum is two grade book and a web browser for attendance. Difficult to figure out how it works without help or where to find reports.

I am also forever having to log in even if I'm in the middle of entering grades. It's something like every five mins or so. It has also dropped multiple grades for me after Ive told it to save or it can't contact the servers.

Unknown.

Font is easy to see and you can track attendance and grades in the same program.

It is not user friendly. Reports are sometimes hard to find. Grades have to be sorted through to find anything. It is much more difficult to use than others I have used in the past and has less functionality.

The only benefit I see is that it averages grades and allows a teacher to exempt a student from an assignment