At the start of the second quarter, it was discovered that Skyward had a problem calculating grades for the first semester. This issue was noticed by teachers who started to enter grades and encountered an issue. The grading issue came from Skyward not being able to calculate the cumulative grade of quarter one and quarter two, which led to grades being inaccurate.
“What was happening was they were taking an average between your quarter one grade and quarter two grade to create the semester grade,” Assistant Principal Joe Horvath said. “Now, that creates a lot of inequities within grades when that happens, so it was not an accurate picture of how the student was doing.”
The problem was caused by the new Skyward not having the same programming as the previous version. In the previous version, Skyward was programmed with the ability to cumulative quarter one and quarter two grades together. However, that option is not available in the new version simply because it hasn’t been programmed in yet.
Even though the issue was discovered quickly, it took more than a month to be fixed which caused people to stress throughout the school.
“It was unnerving how long we went where the published semester one grades were inaccurate, I think that’s a big deal,” math teacher Jack Williams said.
While the issue seemed easy to fix, Skyward continued to have a hard time understanding what the problem was, which prolonged the grading problem and led to more annoyance around the school.
“And no matter what, no matter how many times that we have communicated with Skyward, Skyward did not understand what our issue was,” Horvath said. “They didn’t see that there was any issues with averaging the quarter one and quarter two grades.”
Skyward was finally able to understand what was wrong thanks to Mr. Williams making an example to show Skyward how the grades were supposed to look when calculated correctly, but even though Skyward could now understand what the problem was they were still no help in finding a solution.
Eventually a solution was found by reaching out to other high schools like Whiteland and Lawrence Central, who had both run into the same problem and found a solution to move forward.
Ultimately, to fix the issue, teachers had to get rid of quarter grades and just keep the semester grades. This change had to happen because of the uncertainty regarding how long it would take Skyward to put programming in place to calculate properly.
“Writing that program could have taken anywhere between three weeks to three years just depending upon where it fell on their level of priorities. And to them, that wasn’t a high priority,” Horvath said.
Skyward’s inability to properly calculate grades was a frustration that took lots of time and effort to fix. But through the hard work of school faculty, a solution was found that hopefully will help both students and teachers alike.
“The fact that we were able to get it fixed is just something that really, it makes me happy that now everybody has an accurate representation of what they’re doing within their classroom,” Horvath said.
