This year, Summit students were horrified to discover that their grade percentages will be “locked” in Canvas for the foreseeable future, leaving students frustrated and confused.

Why This is Happening

Poor communication from the school district and administrators is leaving students and their families in the dark as to why Bend-La Pine Schools is suddenly switching to displaying grades in Synergy when there was seemingly nothing wrong with doing so in Canvas.

There are multiple reasons for the district’s switch in grading platforms. The first is that the district no longer has Grade Guardian, a software platform that the district previously used to pull reports and pool grades to detect struggling students. Without this software, the district has mandated that teachers must input grades into Synergy, the platform including StudentVUE and ParentVUE portals. 

“If we’re making sure that all of those grades are in Synergy, then we can pull reports [from there],” said Donna Servignat, Summit’s principal. “Then we can also make it, from the district perspective, easier for parents and students to just go to one place rather than between [Canvas and Synergy].”

But this change still forces students and parents to switch between two separate platforms. Students have to look to Canvas for their assignments and individual grades, and now they have to travel to StudentVUE to check their overall grades.

Next year, the Bend-La Pine Schools will be switching to standards-based grading. However, in the meantime, the district has found many compatibility issues between Canvas and Synergy.

“Because Canvas and Synergy don’t talk to one another for standards-based grading, the district is requiring that all teachers move toward using Synergy as the place where we’re reporting grades,” said Servignat.

When grading assignments on the one to four scale in Canvas, teachers are unable to attach grades to the standards on the rubric. The district decided to switch to Synergy even earlier than required to help both students and their families adapt to the new system. 

However, the introduction of these two platforms has suffered from a poor rollout and instead of providing answers — or solutions — the school blames the district. The district seems to be a scapegoat for student issues. Students are always told “the district this,” “the district that,” and are rarely provided any real answers as to why. 

Student Issues

The Canvas grade-lock has taken away a number of student resources and students’ability to see their live grades.

“I just think it’s impractical,” said Senior Scarlett Livingston. “In the current culture of how high schools work and how college applications work, you have to be very on top of what your grades are, and to not allow us the resources for handling that is just unjust.” 

As much as teachers may hate it, before a major test or assignment, many students would calculate their potential grades through Canvas Web to gauge how much they need to study or stress about the task looming on their to-do list. Now that students’ overall grades are locked in Canvas, they have been stripped of this valuable resource. Most students have seven classes to study for and this tool allowed them to be more efficient by prioritizing and balancing their time between classes.

“[Students] have to be really economical about how they spend their time and what classes they work on at any given time,” said Livingston. “When we don’t have access to things like grade calculators in Canvas, we’re kind of going blind.”

Not only are students scrambling to relearn how to access their grades and assignments, they are upset to find that their grades may be incorrect. Students and teachers both found that early on in the school year, there were many issues with the synchronization between the two platforms, causing confusion and panic. 

After a rough start, administrators attempted to fix these issues through meetings and emails with teachers to ensure their systems were set up correctly.

“If teachers are using the traditional grading method, they should have nightly sync turned on in Canvas so that grades transfer every night, without fail,” said Erin Carroll, an English teacher serving as one of Summit’s digital tech experts this year.

Despite their efforts, the integration between the two platforms has been messy, resulting in many inaccurate grades.

When grades were shown in Canvas, it was extremely easy for students to immediately see how an assignment impacted their grade, but they now have to wait until the evening to do so, something that was not clearly explained to students. 

Between the district, the school and the students and families, there are so many different levels that this information is tricklingly down from and it seems that each level knows less and less. The district hopefully knows what’s happening, the schools themselves seem to understand the recent changes — and the issues with these changes — but students are left picking up the pieces.

Teacher Issues

As if having to adapt to a new system wasn’t hard enough, teachers have been struggling to work out the many issues that Synergy has presented. 

“The biggest issue I’m having with Synergy versus Canvas is that I can’t make changes to assignments directly on Synergy,” said Kelsie Layana, an English teacher at Summit. “So, sometimes an assignment will sync to Synergy from Canvas, but I will decide not to grade it. Then, I can’t delete the assignment in Synergy, so students are seeing that they haven’t been graded or it is marked zero in Synergy and are confused.”

These automatic zeros create added stress for students when they go to check their grades only to find that they are much lower than they expected. With the zero on the assignment pulling down the total grade, students are unable to understand where they truly stand in the class. 

“[To fix the automatic zeros,] it is frustrating that I have to go through someone at the district to go into Synergy and delete the assignment for me,” said Layana. 

While the switch to grading in Synergy, unfortunately, is required for teachers using standards-based grading, most Summit teachers have not yet switched over to this grading scale.

“I just wish we gave teachers who are not doing standard base[d] grading the option to show the course overall grade in Canvas this year to help mitigate some of these syncing issues,” said Layana. 

Almost two months into the school year, many issues with grading have yet to be fixed. Most students are now in the habit of not believing the grade they see on StudentVUE, knowing that many are inaccurate. 

The locked grades are just the tip of the iceberg. Standards-based grading is on its way and the platform switch is perhaps a sneak peak of the chaos and confusion to come.