How does grade averaging work in SIS/Powerschool?

[Anonymous]

Our school district uses the Powerschool/SIS software as gradebook.

I'm trying to make sense of how SIS computes the rounded percentage number in the "Final Grade" column.
I noticed that this value is not the same value you'd get if you summed up all assignment points and divided by the sum of the denominators, even after accounting for items that are marked as excluded.
The result is off by between -1 and +2 percentage points, beyond the range that could be explained by undisclosed rounding policies.

The SIS user interface includes a footnote warning that says: "1 This final grade may include assignments that are not yet published, or may be the result of special weighting used by the teacher" and when you click on it, it provides an example of a custom weighting/exclusion policy a teacher may set.

My questions are:

- If a teacher did set a custom weighting and/or exclusion policy, would this policy be shown in the user interface, or not? Note that the legend at the bottom already includes graphical symbols for "Exempt from Final Grade" etc., but like I said, they are not consistent with the displayed final grade.

- Does the teacher have a button to show/not show such policies?

- How does the system round fractional integers? Does it round down, up, or to the nearest whole number, or does the school district configure this? Or the teacher?

- How does the system compute the year-end course grade in a 4-quarter setup? Is it averaging the rounded quarter scores or is it computing an average over all assignments during this year and then rounding?

I should add our school district uses a traditional point-based system and no "innovations" like SBG or similar, or at least we haven't heard of any such things. Teachers also haven't said that they are using "drop lowest score" or similar options.

As an observation, I noticed that some teachers pay great attention to how many points they make each assignment worth: for instance, the Geometry teacher distinguishes between tests (100 pts), quizzes (50 pts), assessments (30 pts), classwork (6-10 pts), and homework (6-4 pts). But in history, every assignment is worth 10 pts (be it a major test or just an exit slip). The English teacher uses a system that sometimes assigns 10, sometimes 100 pts to assignments of similar effort/scope, and you can't really tell what idea she pursues. But, if the points given do not reflect the actual weighting, and if there is no additional indication as to what the actual weight is, this may be meaningless. I'm also not going to imply that the history and English teachers do not understand weighted arithmetic means. Since DC has averages close to 100% in all subjects, I cannot reverse engineer what the actual weighting is. I worry about the future though, and quite frankly if DC were a student where reaching 90% or reaching 80% for a desired grade mattered this would be a highly unsatisfying situation for them.