Troubleshooting Report Cards

Last updated April 1, 2021 by MB

Chart:

Explanation:

(Please note that "the registrar" in the text below can refer to several administrators here, it's not a single person.)

Our report cards are hybrid in the sense that we use traditional grades (letter grades/percentages) as well as standards grades (E for "Excellent", S for "Satisfactory", etc.) Teachers enter both kinds of grades via the PowerTeacher Pro gradebook.

For standards grades, the report card will match whatever the teacher puts in the gradebook right away; but for traditional grades, the registrar must first Permanently Store the grades before the report card will show them. This process copies whatever is in the teacher's gradebook at that time into a separate part of the database. That part of the database is viewable via the PowerSchool admin portal -> Historical Grades page for a given student. If the teacher changes a traditional grade after the store grades process has been run, then the store grades process must be run again for that student. This ensures that the letter grades of permanent record are protected from accidental edit/deletion in the teacher's gradebook later.

One of the circumstances where this can go off the rails is, when a student was enrolled in the course late, or was dropped and then re-enrolled with incorrect dates. For example, a student might get put into a French class on the PowerSchool admin side while schedules are being built en-masse at the start of the year, with a start date of 8/26/2020 like everything else; then, during the shuffle and flux of scheduling, she is accidentally dropped on 8/29/2020. No one notices, she's still showing up to class, etc. But, later on, when Q1 ends on say 10/22, and grades are due on say 10/26, the teacher notices that the student is missing from her class roster. The registrar says "oops" and (re)enrolls the student into the class, the teacher now puts in a grade for Q1, the registrar stores grades, and everything seems like it should be fine...but, it's not. The grade will not be stored, and will be blank on both the Historical Grades page and the report card.

This is because, for better or worse, PowerSchool's "enroll a student into a course" function defaults to a course start date of "today." That's convenient when it's the beginning of the year, but not so much when we're making changes later. So, when the registrar enrolled the student on 10/26, she should've changed that class's start date to the student's actual first day in the class -- 8/26, or, in the case of an accidental drop, the day of the drop (more on that below). But instead, by default, it enrolled them as though their first time in the classroom was 10/26. This means that, from PowerSchool's perspective, the student was not present at all during Q1, which ended 10/22, and therefore the store grades process ignores the "erroneous" Q1 grade.

The fix here is to go into the admin side and pull up the student's All Enrollments page and correct the dates of the course enrollment(s) to match reality. If there was an accidental drop/reenroll, then make the dates contiguous. (You can't DELETE a dropped course enrollment, because there might be attendance associated with it.) In the example below, the student was enrolled in French 6 at the beginning of the year; then, dropped a few days later by accident (dropped courses are red); then, re-enrolled sometime later when it was noticed, e.g. October. But she was actually present in the class the entire time. So, I have corrected her second enrollment's start date to be 8/31, the same day as the first enrollment's drop date:

Once the course enrollment dates have been corrected, the registrar can re-run the Permanently Store Grades process for just that student, and it will store the Q1 grade properly. PowerSchool is VERY PICKY about dates. :)