Assessment | News

Free Tool Tracks Student and Class Benchmark Progress

• By Evan Tassistro
• 08/25/10

Benchmark Grading has launched a free online tool for student grading and progress analysis toward state and core benchmarks. The Web service provides a teacher gradebook with extended features including comments and reports to keep parents informed.

After free signup and account creation, teachers record assignment grades for their students along with optional comments. From there, assignments can be linked to core or state-specific benchmarks; class progress by benchmark can be viewed in graph or percentile bar format; and the gradebook can be saved as an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The tool presently supports Washington and Oregon state standards, with California, Idaho, and Alaska to be added later.

Browser-based Benchmark Grading is also designed as a teacher-parent communication medium. Teachers can exchange secure messages with parents, and parents can view grades and comments specific to each assignment as well as reports generated by the system. Parents log in via their own free separate account.

More information can be found here.