Entering the new school year of 2016-17, Klein ISD has gotten rid of the old grading system called Grade Speed and replaced it with a new grading system called Skyward. With this change comes with a whole new frontier for grading and keeping track of grades.

Some teachers accept the fact that their beloved grading system had been changed.

“I think it has greater potential.” Chase Hooper, said. “It’s just going to be a learning process for a lot of people. A major benefit is that it’s going to streamline a lot of information, that teachers in the past had to flip flop between two different systems, and I’m really glad that Skyward only requires the one. I say if not now it will eventually be better, it’s just depending on people needing to learn it.”

Others miss the old format and layout of grade-speed.

“I can think of a number of teachers, who will remain nameless, will miss grade speed. Everybody misses the thing they were comfortable and used to. For a little bit, you have a headache from trying to learn all the new things with the new system. It creates a lot of stress from getting used to it. The teachers were used to what they had,” Hooper said

The cause of a new change of pace and style regarding grades may not be for the best.

“It offers some things better than Grade Speed, but the way it manages grade list per period is less efficient.” English three teacher Sharon Carpentier.  ”It’s not allowing us to combine all my students from each period in to one class, I end up having to go through different pages just to upload grades for each class.”

However, Sharon Carpentier said she felt Grade-Speed was easier to use and more organized other agree.

“I think it is harder to navigate than grade speed was.” Said English two teacher Jessica Bolner It has a lot more windows, so you constantly have to navigate between the windows that pile up on top of each other. The screens look more antiquated; they don’t look as modern as or user-friendly as grade speed was,”

But beside the fact that Skyward is a new system with new features, we can still benefit from it in different ways.

“The benefit I see is that last year we had to switch between Grade Speed and a different program called Power School to acquire student information, so you were constantly having to go between to programs where I understand under Skyward everything is streamlined into one program so hopefully one program is easier than two,” Bolner said