Overview
GradeWatch is a monitoring tool for parents to keep tabs on their kids’ grades without having to constantly ask “how are your grades?” or manually check school portals every day.
Status: Active development
Target: Parents with kids in middle school through high school
The Problem
Checking your kid’s grades is tedious:
- School portals are slow and clunky
- Notifications are either non-existent or way too noisy
- You end up checking manually, which takes time and is easy to forget
- By the time you notice a problem, it’s already been a problem for weeks
Asking “how are your grades?” every day creates friction. Kids hate it, parents hate it, but if you don’t ask, you miss when something’s slipping.
The Solution
GradeWatch automatically checks your student’s grades on a schedule and sends smart notifications when something actually matters:
- A new assignment was graded
- A grade dropped significantly
- An overall class grade changed
- A missing assignment was posted
You configure how often it checks and what triggers a notification. Then you can stop logging into the portal unless there’s actually something to see.
Key Features (Planned)
- Automated grade checking: Runs on your schedule (daily, twice daily, etc.)
- Smart notifications: Only alerts you when something meaningful changes
- Historical tracking: See trends over time, not just snapshots
- Multi-kid support: Monitor multiple students from one dashboard
- Configurable thresholds: Set what constitutes a “significant” change
Tech Approach
The challenge with GradeWatch is that school portals are not designed for automation. Most don’t offer APIs, which means:
- Web scraping student information systems (like Skyward, PowerSchool, etc.)
- Handling authentication securely
- Dealing with portal-specific quirks and changes
- Storing grade history for comparison
The goal is to make it simple enough that a non-technical parent can set it up in under 5 minutes.
Why I’m Building It
My kids are in school. I want to know when their grades change, but I don’t want to log into a slow, janky portal every single day. And I definitely don’t want to be the parent constantly nagging “how are your grades?”
If I can automate the monitoring and get notified only when it matters, everyone wins. The kids get more autonomy, I get peace of mind, and we avoid the daily “did you check your grades?” dance.
Current Status
GradeWatch is in active development. The core scraping and notification logic works. The focus now is on:
- Supporting multiple school systems
- Improving reliability when portals change their layouts
- Building a clean, simple UI for configuration
- Deciding on deployment approach (self-hosted vs. SaaS)
Not yet publicly available, but getting close.