As with many education institutions across the globe, Blackburn College provides access to an online student information system. The student portal, known as CAMS Three River Systems, allows for faculty to post important information for courses such as downloadable documents, syllabi or hyperlinks to articles. One important function that the portal system serves is a record keeper of students’ grades. However the portal does not always reflect the most current grades for students. Sometimes students don’t find out how they are performing in a class until after a mid-term or final examination.
Display from the Google Classroom menu
Some students are disgruntled by what they see as a lack of attentiveness on the part of their professors. “Most of the professors that I have, they only update grades for mid-term and finals and if you want to know how you’re doing in the course otherwise you have to talk to them about it. And then they make it out to be a hassle for them,” said junior creative writing major Kaja Carter. Other students are not sure that the process is quite as big a hassle as the professors make it out to be. Senior creative writing and psychology major Katie Payne thinks, “if they would just put [the grades] in [the portal] as they do it, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.”
Some professors are quick to defend the portal. While English and communications professor Dr. Mark Benedetti agrees that the portal has less tools than other online student information systems such as Moodle or Blackboard, he does find the portal easier to use than any of the other applications available. “In some of my classes I might have regular small assignments…I tend not to post grades for those on the Portal much at all. I generally reserve the Portal grades for larger assignments,” said Benedetti. “I don’t think it benefits students much to see that they got ten points out of 1,000.” There are students who wish to know every detail of how they are performing in a class and disagree with waiting until a midterm to see those results. Payne has already turned in several assignments for her courses but she argues “I don’t know how I’m doing because there’s nothing on the Portal.”
Some other professors believe that students should have access to their grade information quickly and efficiently. Political science professor Dr. Laura Wiedlocher puts assignment grades on the portal for students to track as soon as she has graded them. She also doesn’t think of the process as any sort of hassle. “Two minutes” is how long it takes Wiedlocher to put in grades for each student. However she feels that there isn’t much of a reason to use the portal other than as a secure place to put grades. “I personally don’t like the portal system at all. I find it clunky, hard to use. It’s not intuitive,” said Wiedlocher. She prefers to use the Moodle system for posting assignments and documents online for students.
There are some professors that do use Moodle to post student grades. Senior psychology major Meghan Naugle said “I like how the Moodle has [grades] set up. Dr. Karl does weekly quizzes and so we get to know how each quiz turned out.”