GradeView gets shot down, suspect unknown

By Justin Greenzaid Sports Editor

Stressful. When students are asked to describe school in one word, “stressful” comes up frequently. Often experienced by students of all grade levels, this stress is oftentimes built up by grades. Whether it is due to a parent’s expectations or self goals for the future, grades are the leading contributor to the stress of WCHS students.

The way students check their grades can differ in a few ways. However, until the beginning of 2023, most students used the app GradeView to check their grades. GradeView, formerly known as “myMCPSHelper,” was started in October 2017 by Seth Setse who was a student at Sherwood High School at the time. Since then, the app was downloaded over 150,000 times and was used by a large portion of MCPS students. This was until MCPS recently shut down GradeView, starting off the new year poorly.

The app had an extremely simple design and contained an extraordinary feature that is credited as to why the majority of students admired the app: the ability to simulate grades by adding new future grades or changing past grades to preview how that would impact a student’s overall grade. Although simulating grade results could easily be done with a spreadsheet, this feature, along with the expedient response time to teacher grade input, made stress levels of students all around the county much lower. At the end of the day, knowing the score one or worksheet to meet their overall goal in the class makes it much easier to concentrate.

“GradeView made life much easier and was an app much I relied on until it was gone,” WCHS senior Brendan alleviated a lot of my own stress around grades as knowing what grade I had in a class is vital for choosing what classes I should focus on.”

The alternatives to GradeView include the app which does not contain as many features as the GradeView app did and takes longer to update grades.

“I tried to rely on MCPS’s attempt at a grade book known as StudentVue/Synergy, but the lack of intuitiveness, ability to change or alter grades and fast updates made it very unreliable and inaccurate,” Carnathan said.

Even though GradeView was highly advantageous to students, few people, including administrators and teachers, found the app to be hindering. Some would argue since students could see that assessment of the quarter, they would still maintain Knowing information like this demotivated students to study and learn the material since they were aware their grade would already be set in stone. to have access to this type of data. However, the downfall of the app is not just upsetting for students but also for the creator alike.

“At times if I knew my I didn’t perform my best on a certain test then I wouldn’t spend as much time studying. However, many times, knowing a certain test grade I needed in order to get the overall grade I was aiming for do my best,” WCHS senior Jamie Calhoun said.

“It was heart-breaking for me to have to shut down the app. I’d been working on the loved seeing it grow over the years. I’d hoped to be able to expand GradeView even further and wanted my little brother to be able to work on the app with me when he got into High School. I wish the ending wasn’t so abrupt for the students, I had been alive for a few months but in the end, I ran out of options,” GradeView creator Seth Setse, said.

Now, students are beginning to look for new alternatives to replace the main replacement to come is a website, which through methods can be turned into a mobile app, called GradeMelon. GradeMelon has similar features to GradeView, including the beloved grade inputting feature, but the layout is not quite as simple and user-friendly. Other than this, the only other option that remains is StudentVue, which most students try to avoid due to its lack of necessary features.

“I think [GradeMelon] is a suitable replacement, but I don’t think it compares to the intuitiveness of GradeView,” Carnathan said. “I wish GradeView would just be brought back because it was an extremely useful tool for students and helped to relieve some of the stress associated with school.”

The event that GradeView becomes unprohibited is very rare, so students will have to move on with just the fond memories of the software. One day, maybe there will be an even greater app than GradeView, but for now the app, which has set the precedent for all other grade managing apps, is the one developed by the one and only Seth Setse.

“It was incredible seeing students in my classes using the app and watching it expand to the whole county,” Setse said. “Even though GradeView supported many school districts, it was always the MoCo students who were the biggest consumers of the app, and I’m happy to have been able to create something that could help the community I grew up in.”