Gradelink Reviews

Gradelink has many features, and they continue to improve it. It is customizable. The best thing I like about Gradelink is their customer support. They have responded to me in expedient fashion. They have even made a design change or two for me.

I am not in love with the report card feature. We have elementary and secondary students which use different formats. I wish they had the ability to show cumulative GPA for high school report cards. They only provide annual GPA.

The integration into our existing system was painful, mainly because our previous processes were primitive and we had some unique requirements being a religious school that is partly a boarding school and partly a local school and serves both high school and college. Gradelink was not setup for that scenario but worked very hard with us to create work-arounds that, after one year, seem to be working well. Their communication included all the methods we needed and replaced a hodge-podge of approaches we had been using. It is now seamless and very useful. Our parents are very appreciative of the improved communication we now offer as well as the mobile app that lets them more easily track their child's progress. Teachers love the ease with which assignments can be created and scored. The addition of Google Classroom integration was huge for our school as we a fully committed to Classroom and can now easily sync grades. Their approach works well with few hiccups once you have the process down.

We were told that we would be able to handle both our high school and our college with one "copy" of Gradelink. This has proved problematic, but GL continues to work with us on solving those problems. There are still problems we are having with transcripts and class rank and hope those get solved before the end of the year.

Transcripts are easy to find and save as a pdf.

The calendar needs to be visible on the app. We really needs parents to be able to subscribe to the school calendar. It's synced from gradelink to our gradelink website, but parents really do need to have the ability to then subscribe to the calendar so the info can go directly to their phone calendars.

It was very easy to transition and implement Gradelink as our new Student Information System. It is user friendly and easy to understand. Maneuvering through the site from one class or student to another is seamless and quick. The details that have been included in the teacher functions is more than I have encountered with any other system. Their customer service is also amazing and incredibly helpful.

I would love for there to be a few additional features on the Transcript section (for example: adding in cumulative average percent (i.e. 96.2% overall grade average in addition to the GPA or being able to alter the layout)). Overall, Gradelink has been an amazing addition to our school and we are very happy with all that Gradelink offers.

The software is fully featured, and offers a lot of bells-and-whistles within the basic package (attendance, grades, email messaging, discipline, GPA, reports, report-cards generation, contact info, emergency info, medical records info etc.). For a moderate price, you can add a few more features (e.g. unlimited text messaging, parent/student registration etc). The platform is very intuitive and allows a lot of customization (grade periods, grade scale, weighted grading, own discipline and attendance system etc). Support is well rounded, with a lot of online instructional materials (video and text) and phone support is very responsive. Another nice thing is that you can open simultaneously several accounts (admin, teacher, etc) in the same browser, and it has good security measures (accounts can be blocked by admin, you know who signed last and when, accounts get locked after third wrong singnin attempt etc).

The overall aspect is outdated, the colors are bleak, the whole system looks old school. Also, it behaves weirdly when averaging periods and grades (sometimes), you don't know exactly how it's done.

I needed a program that would be easy to implement, easy to use, and affordable. After reviewing a number of SIS programs, Gradelink met the needs of the school. Having the program for five years I have found new staff members are able to jump in quickly, parents love the ease of communication and availability of attendance, grades, and comments concerning their children. We also use the "news" page to keep parents up to date with reminders and current events. I use the program for snow cancellation and delays, as well as blast informational emails to our community, including alumni.

There are still a couple of pieces of information that take me time to access, including a quick attendance report on an individual student or a readable transcript that is inclusive of attendance, but a part of that might be my lack of knowledge. Customer service has been excellent in helping us customize report cards, something we could not do independently. Some of the staff is still reluctant to use the planning program to its full capacity, I'm not sure if there is an overarching reason or merely a comfortability learning curve.

Gradelink has been user friendly and provides us with all that we need to store our student information and communicate with our families at a reasonable price. The customer service has been great. It is easy for us to call and get help if we get confused or don't understand an aspect of the program. We do not need to set aside days to do teacher training. The program is simple enough that brief training sessions and video links are all we need to train new teachers. Ease of enrollment and re-enrollment are nice as well.

At times, I would like more features, such as digital sign in for our preschool and aftercare. They have a program for that, but it is not what we need, so we will wait patiently for the program to be perfected! :)

When parents enroll, we have found that they can skip certain answers by just putting in a space or a letter, for example. We would like for that feature to some how be fixed.

I love the ease of use, functionality, and cost of this software. However the part I like MOST is the customer service. Whenever we have a question or issue, Gradelink customer service/technical support representatives are helpful and friendly.

The only part of Gradelink that I don't love is the lesson planning feature. It is sufficient, and I could easily get by using that module. However, I prefer the flexibility of another lesson planning product.

I love the customer support and how easy it is for me to get an answer for what I’m looking for. Never have I worked with better customer support!

I’m not a fan of the lesson plans. They are designed to mirror Planbook, but the features just aren’t there to facilitate it. We ended up switching back to planbook this year. It’s slightly aggravating because gradelink is an all in one system.

Great value. Incredible customer service.

Doesn't have as many features as others. Some tasks have to be completed manually student by student and are thus time consuming; these should be streamlined.

I like how customizable this program is. We are a tiny school that is self-paced and year-round. It seemed like we could not find a product that checked all of our boxes.

I wish that users could have multiple roles. I have a teacher who is also an administrator. We had to create two accounts for him.

Mostly it is easy to work with and if we need support I know we are able to get it.

Starting the students in active from when they were inactive.

Every information we need is stored in G.Link. All lesson plans and standards are together. Standards carry a lot of information for teachers. Grades are easily entered and are not lost. Parents communication has gotten better this year because of G.Link. Every teacher has a web page that she/he can design.
Administrators can publish their announcement daily, weekly and monthly.

We like the fact that it prepares the students' report cards and transcripts. We do not have to do that any more. The discipline, students' health life, parents' information is all there for us.
Teachers like it so much. They still need to get used to it and the deadlines they receive but I know for a fact that they like the features in the lesson plans such as copy and paste the whole week then make daily changes. I keep teaching this feature because that 's what will make their planning so easy, especially for those ho have 6 different subjects to plan.

I love how the administrator can easily check teachers' lesson plans, up to date grades. Teachers reports is another feature that is really valuable. Once teacher understand how to use, they can retrieve a lot of information from those reports and use.

The Gradelink staff and team members are extremely sharp and helpful. They usually give us answers right a way even if we call 10 times a day. They still help.
They know well that once we get it we will stop calling them. I love their big support.

One thing does bother me. We want to send information to parents such as pictures, newsletters and so on. We can not send 2 at the time or more than one.
We have to wait a certain time in order to send another info. This does work for us as we have to send timely information. Something that we have to send today, we can wait until next week to send. It is time sensitive.

This software allows our admin and teachers to work smarter not harder. The the software is utilized the easier it becomes to start a new school year because so much info carries over. The information that parents and students have is presented differently because each user has a different goal for using the software. Gradelink makes it easy to integrate all aspects of the education environment into one easy to use vehicle.

The software does not allow users to edit and input their own personal information. There fore keeping up on ever-changing hone numbers and even teacher info is a challenge. The information from previous years is not as easy to access. It is accessible though.

Love that we can mass email, individuals or whole grades. Gradelink is user friendly, everything is in one place. There are a lot of tools that parents can use to access grades, assignments, teacher's pages, and now we've set it up for discipline. (instead of using a separate program) Parents also have input on community service hours, we can add ACT/SAT scores to transcripts, too.

That the "Not Re-enrolled" button doesn't work. It just gives all students, instead of the ones not re-enrolled.
Teachers not having the ability to send a text for their classes. - So, they have to use "Remind"

We really trust Gradelink, as they previously hosted our old site and always do a great job with our school package we have through them. Since we knew we were overdue for an updated website, it was an automatic choice for us to ask Gradelink to handle the design. We are so thrilled with our new website! It is so much cleaner, fresher, user-friendly, precise and engaging. Vince helped us take the next best steps and continues to assure us beyond the finished product, which demonstrates outstanding customer service. Rep was absolutely phenomenal! So very patient, detail-oriented, honest, attentive and kind he went above and beyond to make sure we were satisfied with the final product and that we felt comfortable to collaborate and share our ideas and needs during the building process. Our site needed so much work, and he was always very gracious in our planning meetings. His expertise was so evident and he worked extremely hard to ensure our satisfaction. Genuine excitement about our website project was also evident and helped spur us along when we needed to envision our future site. We are so grateful for Rep and Gradelink!

Everyone on our team isn't super "techy" so there will be a learning curve. However, we are glad that we can utilize the monthly support that Gradelink offers.

Gradelink made the transition from a paper & spreadsheet system to an online multi-user student information system extremely easy. Everyone we worked with made implementation and training super smooth. In the years since, we have continued to receive excellent customer care and support when needed.
Also, as a Wisconsin Choice school, I love the WISEdata implementation.

My least favorite feature is the way it handles student contacts: you must enter all contacts for each student. There is no way to build a file of contacts and link them to appropriate students. So a family of three students with four emergency contacts means I am keying in the same four e.c. people three times. It is not a deal breaker, but the bigger our school gets, the more annoying it becomes.

Gradelink is extremely user friendly & intuitive. When I have had a concern or problem Gradelink's support always goes above & beyond to resolve the issue. Today I spoke with [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] about reformatting our report cards, he was absolutely wonderful! He gave me some great tips & insight. I greatly appreciate the time he took to format a few different report card types & a few other changes while on the phone.

I would like to see some changes to the billing tab. . . .It could also be because I do not have an accounting background. The ledgers are really hard to read from an administrators side, the running balance in particular. Also, the statements for the parents can be confusing. We use Quickbooks for accounting & have been sending parents statements from there, as they are much easier for our parents to read. It would also be nice to be able to have parent information available when you click on the student demographics in the Financial tab.

We used Gradelink as our first online grading program 12 years ago as our first online grade program. The parents LOVED it, but I thought maybe it was because it was a new way for parents to see feedback about their kid's grades. Then we switched to Renweb and then to Sycamore because we got new principals. I hated them. Too complicated and most parents did not ever use it. I assumed it was because it was no longer a new thing. But when we switched back this year, parents INSTANTLY started checking grades more. Parents really like the emails. I like how simple it is as a teacher. Very few clicks. Easy class set up. I like how easy it is to conclude classes. I like that I can click on a student's name and see their current grades.

There are a few things I wish:
print off ALL my students' missing assignments in a report--not just missing from the classes they have with me
I wish there was a teacher app--especially for attendance

I like that the platform is easy to use. I am able to keep all my grades in one place and assign a value to each section.I like that emails send are stored for future review.

The switch between entering in new assignments is not easy. Programs we have used in the past made it easy to enter in new assignments quickly. The use of the planning component is not easy.

We are continuing to learn this software. I like that we are growing and the software is adding the features we need to continue to grow.

I don't have any negatives so far :) As we continue to use the software to its fullest something may come up but for now, I do not know of any.

I love that I always have access to the software and can use it whenever and wherever. I can schedule messages and really have no issues.

I would like there to be a mobile app portion for use.

I find Gradelink easy to use. I came into the school when the person administering Gradelink had an emergency in her family. I was able to do all of the end of year processes with a little bit of guidance from the Gradelink Customer Service Team. My 'stepping in' became a full-time job with Gradelink Administration being a key component. I love the integration that Gradelink provides for Student Information, Online Enrollment, Website Services, and Payment Solutions.

My own lack of knowledge of SIS. Most things are intuitive, but if it's a process I'm not familiar with, I reach out to the Customer Service Team, who are there right away with guidance for me.

Ease of sending communications to parents, staff, and students.
Improvements are being made all the time and Gradelink staff is always willing to help find solutions to problems.

Lesson plans are not accessible to old terms that have been closed.
Attachments sent in emails are not accessible.

Gradesheet is like a spreadsheet.
Many reports available.
Repository for all data (medical, academic).
Accessible from anywhere.
Exports to xcel.

Gradesheet - wish assignments only required date due (not date assigned), and that date due would auto populate as current date (or allow this to be customizable by each school).
Can't filter demographic info exported to xcel (can only do it by manipulating data after exporting).
Lack of customization - would like to customize conduct categories so parents and teacher can view/keep track.