Grademelon has been a useful app for students in tracking grades and seeing what needs to be scored on certain assignments in order to raise or keep a grade. Recently, MCPS has blocked the website, so students now have to rely on StudentVUE, also known as Synergy, to check their grades. As a result of this useful tool no longer being accessible, some students struggle to adjust to the loss of something that held so much importance to them.
MCPS is known to block many sites that may be deemed as distracting for students, such as Instagram, Pinterest and many other social media or game sites. However, Grademelon was an academic tool for students that allowed them to track progress and see semester grades. It also had features for users that were easy to navigate. Synergy provides some of the same features but the user interface is a little bit more complicated.
“I used Grademelon to track my grades and see what needs to be improved before the end of a quarter,” WCHS sophomore Morgan Gudger said. “I also used Grademelon to see what I needed to score in order to bump up a grade or to maintain a grade.”
Grademelon is a website that helped neatly display what was on Synergy, with color coding based on grades and display semester grades. The color coding and grade averages were helpful to many students, such as WCHS Sophomore Kenzie Manaloto.
“Grademelon was a site I preferred over Synergy because of the way it was organized,” Manaloto said. “I liked how the colors were organized based on the grade you had. For example, if you had an A, the text was in green, but if you had a B, the text was in blue.”
Many websites have been blocked as students are using them to watch television and play games during class time, distracting themselves and others. But, the block of such a helpful website was confusing for students.
“I can understand why they block some websites, but I thought Grademelon was helpful for students,” Grudger said. “I assumed that maybe it was blocked because students were on it too much during class and it was a distraction.”
The block of Grademelon has not greatly affected students, but it has been hard for some students to adjust to Synergy as the formatting of the site is so foreign compared to the neat layout that Grademelon provided. Though academic success will not greatly suffer, it is switching to the greater use of a website that may be hard for students.
“I do not think the block itself will affect me a lot academically, but adjusting to Synergy will be hard,” Manaloto said. “The layout is so different and there are so many more factors on Synergy that I did not have to navigate through when I was using Gradmelon.”
One key difference between Grademelon and Synergy was the ability to put in new assignments and organize them based on how much it counted towards their grade. So, if a quiz was coming up in two weeks, rather than having to wait for the teacher to put it in, a student could just put it in themselves and play around with different scores to see how it will affect their grade.
“Using Synergy has not been too different from using Grademelon, but I can no longer put in new assignments and change the grades to see what I need to score,” Gudger said. “I hope that Synergy can add this feature, because it was really helpful for assignments.”
Overall, Grademelon was a helpful academic website that students could use to track their grades in an organized way. Synergy does have more features, but that can make it difficult for users to navigate. Ideally, sites like these should not have to be banned, but it is important for students to stay on task during the school day, and if banning the website helps improve focus, then it is justified.
“I hope that the ban gets revoked,” Manaloto said. “Grademelon was really helpful to me as a student and I am disappointed to see that it is no longer usable for students. In the future, hopefully Synergy can improve its formatting so that it can be a little more helpful to students.”
