Pros and Cons of PowerSchool SIS 2024 (2024)

Pros and Cons

• Admissions management.

• Proper student/parent documentation management.

• Payment process management.

• Social media integration of the educational institute could be added.

• Website of the educational institute could be integrated.

• A main dashboard with student statistics could be added.

Pros and Cons

• keeping and recording grades

• checking attendance

• keeping students' academic records

• keeping student's private information

• PowerSchool Student Information System is better if it has the capacity of sending emails to parents and students

• PowerSchool Student Information System is better if it has the capacity of sending alerts to parents if student is late or tardy or absent in class

Pros and Cons

• Scheduling students.

• Grades

• Integration with other products.

• Scheduling students could use a more streamlined approach.

• Learning how to use PowerSchool can seem intimidating at first.

• Some of the selections in the program are small and hard to read or see.

Pros and Cons

• Accurate student data repository

• easy to use teacher portal and gradebook

• Parent portal access to grades and alerts

• Access to the DB for external integrations

• Lengthy product suggestion implementation

• Downtime support

Pros and Cons

• Student Grades

• Teacher Gradebook

• Parent Portal

• Course management

• Attendance

• State Reports

• Student Data Management

• Speed of Page loads are long

• Analysis of student information

• Contacts

Pros and Cons

• Easy grading capabilities

• Attendance taking capabilities

• Reports

• More varieties of reporting

Pros and Cons

• Allows for weighting of assignments.

• Logging discipline notes that follow the student from grade to grade.

• Calculates grades accurately.

• Does not consistently communicate with related software such as Illuminate for Special Education Students.

• Drop down menus frequently refresh as data is entered which slows down the user's ability to enter information.

• Icons are sometimes unclear and not easily understandable. Word labels for some items might be more effective.

Pros and Cons

• What I like best about PowerSchool Student Information System is that you can use it as a very basic level (rosters, attendance, grades) or go to very deep levels of integration with other PowerSchool systems (registration, human resources, special education).

• The PowerSchool Student Information System support system is strong among current users of the product. There is a vibrant community of end users who are willing to help other users.

• Resources for self learning are abundant in the PowerSchool Student Information System Community site.

• What I don't like is that it sometimes too complex for the typical user.

• Secretaries live in PowerSchool Student Information System as part of their duties. Some of the knowledge necessary to get the most out of PowerSchool Student Information System requires some level of programming knowledge, which is beyond most secretaries' skill sets.

• As PowerSchool continues to purchase other platforms to expand their offerings, it is difficult to stay up to speed on all of the trainings.

• Bigger is not always better. Just because you can expand and offer features doesn't mean you should.

Pros and Cons

• PowerSchool Student Information System does a great job of organizing information.

• PowerSchool Student Information System has smooth grading processes.

• It is not intuitive to know all the shortcuts and system tools.

• Training takes multiple days to get comfortable.

Pros and Cons

• It allows me to find all my students information in one place.

• It calculates all my grades for me and weights it so I do not have to do extra work.

• Sometimes I struggle to find the correct classes because I am not able to change the names that my school put in.

• I sometimes cannot easily locate information I am trying to find.

Pros and Cons

• Grade Book

• Attendance

• IEP Integration

• Benchmark Score Integration

Pros and Cons

• Enrollment

• Grades

• Grading could be easier.

Pros and Cons

• Easy to move students around.

• Easy to update student information when changes happen.

• Teacher search can be difficult.

• Data can be lost when teachers are shuffled.

Pros and Cons

• Scheduling is easy.

• The gradebook is convenient and easy to use.

• Sometimes setting up the gradebook can be tricky.

Pros and Cons

• Ease of Use: the menu is very straight forward and easy to navigate through.

• Mobile site/App: I appreciate that there’s a mobile version of the site as well as the app so I can input grades from my smartphone on the go.

• When going to the GA LDS site for our TKES performance review, we don’t get an email like we used to (when the system was not through PowerSchool) when our administrator fills out a document we need to complete.

• I wish it were linked to my email and reminders for inputting grades could be set up on a certain day each month to send me an email reminding of when they’re due.

Pros and Cons

• PowerSchool SIS has made reporting much easier. The ability for us to have instant reports for our administrator is very important, but the ability to pull the raw data and customize our own reports is crucial.

• Tracking attendance is very important as we have truancy issues in our district and often have to provide documentation for court. It is very easy to track, print reports and customize our attendance codes.

• The good is that PowerSchool is easy to use, the ugly is that you will need a dedicated person if you ever want to do a lot of customizations. So someone with a basic technical knowledge of relational databases is key to getting your money's worth out of PowerSchool. Frequently we need additional reports not already offered in PowerSchool, so we have someone that is familiar with sql that can create them inside of PowerSchool.

• The built-in report card module for standards based report cards has always been my biggest disappointment. It's not that it's not there, it's just that you need someone with a programming mentality to be able to make a nice clean report. And changes are tedious and time-consuming to make.

Pros and Cons

• Manage demographic data to help us manage constantly changing state reporting requirements.

• Provide an excellent Gradebook for teachers that provides instant sync of grades to both the PowerSchool database and parent apps.

• At this time I wish PowerSchool would do a better job in attendance tracking. The current system works without errors, but can be cumbersome with the amount of data available.

• Uploading standardized test scores is also cumbersome. It can be done but takes some time to complete, and we had to create custom screens for people to be able to utilize that data effectively.

Pros and Cons

• A wonderful student grade management tool. Easy interface to navigate. Used to add assignments, grade assignments, and categories and percentages.

• Can print detailed reports with the option to select features to print.

• Able to review a student's schedule, classes, grades in other classes, teacher's name and student demographics.

• When creating assignments sometimes a feature is blocked by a pop-up window.

• Would like to be able to print a student's overall attendance record for management.

Pros and Cons

• The mobile app for students and parents is user-friendly and always up to date.

• Information for master scheduling is well done and of vital importance.

• Custom reports and settings are accessible.

• There is a need for a mobile app for the administration to easily view information while away from their desks.

• It would be nice if it had a more robust data warehouse for assessment data.

Pros and Cons

• It organizes your student data for you and allows you to let others (teachers and parents) access the data they need access to daily.

• It allows Administration to control the scheduling, discipline, and administration of the data behind the scenes.

• The Oracle backend is easy to query and stable.

• It allows for too much customization.

• The mobile app causes large districts problems.

• They cater to small districts.

Pros and Cons

• Intuitive to use - Many of the features are those that you would easily be able to easily use simply by testing them out

• Comprehensive Student information-- PowerSchool is the one tool needed to view, log, and track student and parent information. Everything from student birthdays to their individualized educational needs can be logged and tracked in PowerSchool. This makes it very easy for multiple teachers and school personnel to be aware of what students need to be successful.

• Multiple functions-- PowerSchool tracks attendance, holds/creates seating charts, has a "gradebook" for teachers, provides many options to make the gradebook authentic and specific according to the content one is teaching, provides the ability to send out mass emails to students and/or parents, and much more.

• Gradebook Application quits or times out sometimes -- The GradeBook portion of PowerSchool will sometimes randomly quit as I am putting in grades. Although I can easily log back in, it can be a nuisance to deal with this.

Pros and Cons

• Automated calling/messaging for delinquent lunch balances

• Ease of accessing student information quickly

• Ability to view how students are doing in other classrooms and not just classes with you

• It can be difficult adding assignments to the gradebook if you don't click the right sequence of boxes

• Some information is buried in reports where you wouldn't expect them to be

• Setting up the gradebook for the first time may not make sense, especially if you are using standards based grading

Pros and Cons

• PowerSchool can be customized to fit your exact needs. Pages and content can be modified/added or substracted to fit exactly what you need to save for each student.

• Students can be transferred from one location to another easily. This makes continuity of data and reocrds seamless.

• PowerSchool can be set up to work with other systems like IEP Direct and SchoolMessenger. This allows for easier communications with parents and easier communications between schools for special education services.

• My district has customized PowerSchool to fit what we need it to do and is constantly updated as the State of CT comes up with new laws and regulations we need to abide by.

• My biggest issue is not being able to see what the teachers see. PowerSchool and PowerTeacher are not the same and what they see isn't always what I see.

• Cross-platform usage isn't always easy.

Pros and Cons

• PowerSchool houses student or staff information that can be easily accessed by those teachers and administrators who need the information. This allows everyone to go to one place to access information.

• Parents can view their child's grades at any time with their protected login on a parent portal. This allows teachers to keep parents informed and involved in their child's progress at school. When everyone works together it increases our students' chance for success.

• PowerSchool offers videos to train new users. When we have new employees, the videos can be accessed at any time the employee needs as opposed to them waiting for someone to help them.

• It would be great if PowerSchool had an alert pop-up for teachers when they use an assignment category that is not set up in Final Grade Calculation. As it is, if a teacher used an assignment category that is not set up, they cannot print a report card.

• PowerScheduler does not work for our secondary schools because we have limited classes available. We would love a solution that could help with this.

Pros and Cons

• Web based solutions running a very reliable oracle database.

• Very user-friendly.

• It has a very strong support team!

• The state reporting is written to the specs of our department o0f education with makes reports easy.

• They are improving it every day by staying on top of the ever changing technology world!

• Again it is very user-friendly so it is hard to say that is hard to use.

• Don't change a thing!