topic Allow us to have the ability to put in negative grades in PowerSchool SIS in Community Forum

Allow us to have the ability to put in negative grades in PowerSchool SIS

CarsonClement — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 19:07:14 GMT

There are a lot of reasons why a teacher would want to put in negative grade into PowerSchool. Some of the reasons why would be having an assignment and you put in negative points for every time someone misbehaves. This would be a much easier way to change student's grades rather than working out the math for taking points out of an assignments and them wondering why they have missing points.

Re: Allow us to have the ability to put in negative grades in PowerSchool SIS

JeffG9 — Mon, 05 May 2025 12:47:43 GMT

You can't possibly be serious.

Re: Allow us to have the ability to put in negative grades in PowerSchool SIS

greg_matyola — Mon, 05 May 2025 13:06:36 GMT

Carson:

TL;DR: I don't think that a gradebook is the proper way to moderate student behavior. I'd talk to your administrators / superintendents.

I'm a computer guy, not a teacher, so looking at it from a mathematical perspective, I don't know how a student would be able to "understand" how a grade of -10, -100, or -1024 would affect their grade, especially if there was no "floor" to each grade. It starts feeling more "subjective" than "objective".

The only real thing I could think of is giving everyone a "comportment" or "behavior" grade that starts at X points each week, and they lose points from that for various misbehaviors, and comportment is X% of their final grade.

On another number theory, you can give individual assignments to students, and not the entire class as well, so there's other ways to give assignments to students without EVERY student in the class getting the grade.

But as above, I don't think the gradebook is the right tool for this job.

-- Greg

Re: Allow us to have the ability to put in negative grades in PowerSchool SIS

JeffG9 — Mon, 05 May 2025 13:44:40 GMT

In my previous days as a teacher, I did use a "Class Participation" grade for this sort of purpose, although I never used it to "punish" students; I usually used it to boost the grades of students who were clearly actively engaged, just maybe not very vocal. Lowering a student's grade for "classroom management" purposes is a terrible, terrible idea.