By Emory Dunn
Being a student in the 21st century is great: We have endless collaboration tools, can send in assignments through email, track our buses in real time and even know our grades as soon as our professor does. Well, almost.
Between professors stuck in the past who want to grade everything by hand and those who never quite get the grades online correctly, knowing what your grade is can be a hassle. It only gets worse with weighted grades, dropped grades and simply non-existent grades. And come finals when you’ve got one art history test left and you’re wondering how much you really need to study for it. The stress simply piles up when trying to manually calculate what grade you need to maintain your scholarship or pass the class. Just like a late night infomercial, there has to be a better way.
Well now there is!
An app, Grades 2, is just what every student needs. Grades 2 allows you to enter in all of the “grading opportunities” you get in all your classes and then keeps track of what you got, what you need to get and what you’ll have at the end. Unlike a spreadsheet, Grades 2 looks good, works well and is easy to use.
When you first launch Grades 2 you are asked to enter in all of your classes. After that, you simply look over your syllabus and type in all of the possible grades you can get. The way Grades 2 handles this is incredibly intuitive: if you have four tests worth 20 percent each then you type the number of tests, the name and how much they’re all worth and it does the rest. In addition to everything being easy to figure out on your own, there are guides to help if you get confused.
But what makes Grades 2 more than a simple grade tracker is how it helps you know what you need to make. You can enter in what grade you’d like to make (or what you need to make) and Grades 2 will tell you what you need to make on everything, and it updates whenever you add a grade that you earned. So when you pass that art history test with flying colors you can breathe a sigh of relief when you only need to make 70s on everything else.
After your anxieties have been alleviated for one class you can deal with the quarter as a whole. Grades 2 has a spill GPA calculator in it. By typing in the previous quarter and what you want to make in each class in the current quarter Grades 2 will show you what you’re GPA will be.
Out of all the features Grades 2 offers, the best one is the price. Knowing that we’re students, the developer has made Grades 2 free with only small banner ads in the bottom. But, for 99¢ you can remove the ads and support the developer.
Grades 2 is available in the App Store.
