Need help finding the right class? Have a question about how classes work?
Below are frequently asked questions about the Parent Tools feature. If your question isn't answered here, then please use this form to send us your question.
General
Progress report emails are sent once a week, two days after the most recent class. So, if your student has a class that meets on Thursdays, then the homework will be due at the end of the day on Friday, and that information will be collected and sent to you via the progress report email on Saturday.
You may also request an up-to-date report at any time by logging in on this page, and you should receive it within a few minutes of your request.
Reports
The PDF Progress Report will provide you with information about your student's homework performance, and the quality of their participation in class. This page in our School Handbook provides more information about the types of homework in your student's class, and this page provides more information about the colors we use to communicate progress.
These emails will also include a link to a separate Problem Report, which contains the student's results on the Short Answer Challenge Problems as well as detailed information about any Writing Problems. If your student's class has Writing Problems, we encourage you to keep an eye on your student's Writing Problem progress, as this is the best way we have found to truly understand how students are performing in their classes.
You can learn more about these reports on this page of our School Handbook.
The information in this report is generated automatically. We believe that in order to assign a letter grade, we need to look much deeper into the student's performance. For example, how did the student grow over the course? Was the student active on the Message Board? How did the student interact with other members of the class? Did the student help to drive the class discussion? What was the content of the student's work on the writing problems?
We also believe that giving an interim letter grade invites parents and students to ignore what's actually happening in the report we provide. This report gives a much more robust view of how your child is performing in our course.
At the end of a Subject course, we can provide a letter grade upon request. You'll find more information about grades and documentation on this page of the School Handbook.
We understand that a grade is a key. It tries to quickly provide information about a student's level of understanding of the material contained within a course. While the course is in progress, though, we want to give you a more thorough picture of how your student is doing.
However, students are told that their progress bars will turn green when the system has evaulated that they've done enough work to "pass" that particular component of the week's work. As a result, we can give this one guideline: if every bar on a student's report is green or blue at the end of the course, then we will always give that student an A.
This page of the School Handbook provides more information about the colors we use to communicate on the reports, and you can read about how we can translate student progress into grades at the end of a subject course on this page.