A week before the term ends, you log in on Parent Portal, wanting to check your grades. You then go to your individual class grades, and see that in one class, you are failing. You simply freak out for a moment and check to see what you got on your last assignment. You see that the last grade that was put in the gradebook was five weeks ago, and since then, the teacher has not put in any grades. Frustrated, you click out of the window and complain about the teacher to yourself or your parents.

This has happened to almost everyone some time or another. Teachers will take your papers, give them back, and not put them in the gradebook. I understand that teachers do have a lot on their mind, but putting in grades should not be difficult. We have deadlines on our homework and projects, and therefore, teachers should have deadlines to put in grades. Waiting until the last minute is something we students cannot do, and teachers should not be able to do that as well.

Parent Portal is for students to check their grades, assignments, and let students know if they need to work on raising their grades. If a teacher waits until a week before the grading period is over to put in grades, a student may not be able to bring up their grade in time. Parent Portal is useless without grades being inserted into the online gradebook in a timely fashion. If a teacher does not put in grades, Parent Portal will be a desert of abandoned grades from last semester.