Upon returning to school in the fall of 2014, students were deeply saddened to learn that Pinnacle Internet Viewer would no longer be the official grade book of Niles North. Instead, Niles North students and teachers must use a system known as Infinite Campus. Unlike the clean, professional look associated with Pinnacle, Infinite Campus is filled with bright colors and an overload of boxes. While adjusting to any change can be difficult, adjusting to the new grade book was nearly impossible. Students and teachers alike found themselves struggling to do basic tasks such as check or update grades.
What is so wrong with Infinite Campus?
- The grade you see isn’t necessarily the grade you have.
When you glance at a grade while scrolling down you see one grade, but when you click on it there’s a different one. If a teacher entered and saved an assignment, but did not click post, then the assignment shows up but is not necessarily factored into the grade. This leads to much confusion as to what one’s grade really is.
- An 85% is an F
Yes, you heard me. I got my first F on any official document because for some reason the 85 I had in a class came up as an F. No matter what my teacher did to manipulate my grade, it stayed the same. When progress reports go out, parents cannot see the actual percent in the class, they just see the letter grade. It is quite difficult to explain to your parents that you actually have a B and not an F, even when the comment “is a pleasure to have in class” isn’t consistent with the grade associated with it.
- You’re absent even when you’re present
After swiping in the Point one day, I needed to meet with a teacher. As I sat at the desk, my phone lit up with a notification- “Miriam was marked absent from 11/03/2014 3:08 PM to 11/03/2014 3:08 PM.” I read and reread the notification thinking maybe I read the date or time wrong. After staring at it for a good five minute I accepted the fact that I was marked absent for zero minutes. How that happened, I have no idea. Of course, now I was on lockout for absolutely nothing. The attendance dean assured me the system does not just randomly mark people absent, so clearing the absence was quite a mission.
- Looking at grades is a mess
Viewing grades is the issue that bothers people the most about Infinite Campus. When you click on a class, there are so many lines and boxes- it is an eyesore. Trying to determine which grade correlates to which assignment takes way too much concentration. Rather than appearing as points earned/ total points, the grades appear as total points/points earned. Initially, I couldn’t understand why my grades were as they were if I had so much extra credit. I’m not entirely sure why they would chose to arrange the grade book like this. Never, in any of my classes, do my teachers write a grade like that unless I truly earned more points than the amount of points the assignment was worth.
While many of the issues above may seem to be unique to my terrible experiences, they still illuminate the various flaws within the system.
There are two things I like about Infinite Campus, and even those don’t come without problems.
- The App
The Campus Portal App is a handy little app that allows you to check your grades from your phone. It is much neater and easier to look at than the online gradebook. It breaks the grades down by semester, and presents the grades in a much more logical way. On it, there is the ability to check assignments and attendance. Another feature is the notifications for when assignments, grades, or attendance are updated. However, that part of the app is rather faulty. It’s pretty good with sending attendance notifications, but not so much with grade updates. Occasionally the grade notification will come on time, but usually it comes a day or two later, or not at all. Why have the feature if it doesn’t properly work?
- The newly posted grades
When you check your grades online, there is a little table on the top which shows the newly added grades. There is no need to scroll down to see check each grade and see if it’s been changed (which given the issue addressed above was quite a task). Instead, you can immediately see what has been graded.
