TeachHub is the new grading system the NYC Department of Education administered at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year. The new DOE grading system replaces SyncGrade, which was used by Francis Lewis last school year. Some Francis Lewis teachers didn’t have a good initial experience with the TeachHub app.
“I had a bunch of issues with it for the first marking period,” AP English teacher Ms. Contino said. “I couldn’t really do anything in the building. I kept trying to import grades and it kept telling me import was unsuccessful, and then some grades would show up and some wouldn’t, and it was just a big mess.”
The uncertainty with the system led to multiple mistakes occurring that caused drastic changes in students’ grades.
“My teacher ended up giving me a 65 when I’ve been going to class everyday for a Phys. Ed. class and I was confused, but she told me that it was just wrong on the system,” senior Emily Xu said. “However, my grade was actually 100, which is a huge drop and it’s a big confusion.”
“In TeachHub it’s not specific on why we are graded the way we are, and it doesn’t show every single assignment and the due dates,” Xu added. “The grade on there is often wrong as well and we can’t see assignments that we have to do later on.”
Principal Dr. Marmor received several complaints from faculty at the beginning of the year about the new grading system.
“The complaints early in the year were that the grades were not syncing with Google, not all the kids were showing up in the grade book properly, some of their classes weren’t attached, [and] some of the grades would go in and disappear,” Principal Dr. Marmor said. “We had kids who couldn’t log in to their own side of it, we had reports that the assignments that were being graded were not visible in the grade book so you can’t see the assignments.”
“There’s a big difference between the student version that is web-based versus the student version that is app based, so that’s one of the things we recently learned,” Dr. Marmor said. “We really need to get kids using the app version on their phones because the view of the web version on the phone is terrible, and it loses a lot of the information.”
SyncGrades was the grading system Francis Lewis used during the 2022-2023 school year.
“Last year we were forced to use a third choice which was a system called SyncGrades,” Dr. Marmor said. “SyncGrades worked fine, in fact last year we were the only school in New York City that was granted the approval to do something called a Google Integration, which means the grade book you’re using can get data from Google Classroom and it can import it into the grade book.”
However, the Department of Education banned Google Integration to keep the integrity of their security, which cut off any outside communication with @nycstudents.net.
“The DOE would’ve allowed us to use another grade book but we would’ve had to use it with no Google Integration,” Dr. Marmor said. “Ultimately, we evaluated the Department of Education system this year, and they have made a lot of improvements. I did not think it was excellent, but if we didn’t use the DOE grade book this year, think about what we would’ve had to do.”
Dr. Marmor said the gradebook is not a perfect system but that “we are, in a way, not having a lot of good choices.”
“That means one year we did Skedula, the next we did SyncGrades, then the next, which is this year we would’ve been using something else. Then next year, I’m very positive by the time we get to next year, the Department of Education is going to start forcing people to use the grade book.”
The system the Department of Education was using before SyncGrades was called PupilPath, also known as Skedula.
“Up until 2 years ago we used to use Skedula,” Dr. Marmor said. “Skedula is a non-Department of Education system that we paid for and hundreds and hundreds of other schools paid for, and it was working very well. Then there was a data breach and the Department of Education, in response to the data breach, outlawed Skedula.”
A hacker was able to access over 820,000 current, former student’s private information including their names, birthdays, ethnicities, and their home language through PupilPath. Ms. Contino wishes that PupilPath could have improved their security so we could still use the program at Francis Lewis.
“It’s still to me clunky, not the most user friendly,” Ms. Contino said. “I think that what a lot of teachers are doing, including myself, is comparing everything we try with what Skedula or PupilPath used to be and used to provide. By comparison, it’s not quite as easy to use.”
“SyncGrades was a little redundant or repetitive last year,” Ms. Contino said. “There was a lot of extra work, but it still seemed easier in terms of inputting grades, syncing assignments, things like that. There’s a lot of extra work that has to go into the DOE grade book. Ultimately it would’ve been great if we still had Skedula if their security would have been better.”
Dr. Marmor made the executive decision to switch to the DOE grade book this year in order to keep a consistent grade book after a consecutive two years of switching from two different systems.
“We are very aware that this is not a perfect situation,” Dr. Marmor said. “We do believe that as we go further in the year and we go into next year, that not only will the teachers get better at using it, but the product itself will continue to get better along with the user experience. We are well aware that the situation is not perfect and if there was a better answer I would use it.”
