Because Peninsula School District uses PowerSchool provisioning app, teachers can use the PowerSchool grade passback app in Schoology courses to sync grades to the PowerTeacher Pro gradebook.
This article addresses the following questions:
Overview
The PowerSchool grade item passback app is installed in your Schoology course so that you can sync materials and grades from your Schoology gradebook to your PowerSchool gradebook.
You can use the PowerSchool app in your course to determine which categories in your Schoology gradebook correspond with the categories in your PowerSchool gradebook.
System Admin cannot configure the app or sync graded items on behalf of the teacher.
Important: If you'd like the overall grade in Schoology to match the overall grade in PowerSchool, make sure you set the PowerSchool Teacher Traditional Grade Calculation to match:
- The categories in Schoology mapped to appropriate categories in PowerSchool.
- The same weighting on categories in Schoology as in PowerSchool.
- The Calculated by setting grading categories set to Total pts in Schoology and Formula Type set to Category Weighting with the Actions edit icon in PowerTeacher Pro.
and Formula Type set to Category Weighting with the Actions edit icon in PowerTeacher Pro. 
How do teachers configure the app?
- Open the PowerSchool app on the left-hand side of your course.
- When the app is launched, first save settings in the Configuration tab of the app.
- Map your Schoology grading categories to one or more PowerSchool grading categories. Depending on the grading categories in the course, teachers can map more than one Schoology grading category to a single PowerSchool grading category.
Configuration Notes:
- If you've linked your sections in Schoology, you must configure the PowerTeacher Pro app in each of the sections. To do this, open the app from the left menu of the course profile. Once you have configured the first section, click Save, and then click the Section dropdown menu to toggle into a different section and continue configuration.
- Depending on the settings in place for the PowerTeacher Pro app, only Course Admins (instructors) may be able to launch the app from the course. System Admins cannot configure the app or sync graded items on behalf of the instructor.
- In order to sync items with PowerTeacher Pro, the corresponding category must be mapped in the Configuration area.
- We recommend checking the box in front of 'Automatically shorten assignment titles'
- If the lead instructor is changed in PowerSchool, this may remove the category configurations. The new instructor will need to configure categories from the PowerTeacher Pro App.
What information transfers from Schoology to PowerSchool?
Once the configuration settings are saved, teachers can view the status of graded items and grades from the Sync Status Log in the app. The column on the left displays the Title of the graded item. The column in the middle displays the date the item was most recently synced successfully.
The following information is sent to PowerSchool:
- The name of the graded item.
- The max number of points for the graded item.
- The due-date for the graded item.
- The grading category mapped by the teacher in the Configuration area of the app.
- The raw score a student received on the graded item.
- Whether the grade item has a status of Published or Unpublished.
If there has been an error in the sync, a red message icon will appear. Hovering over the icon displays a message that details the error.
Note: If you are using PowerTeacher Pro in
linked sections and you are planning to sync grade items yourself, you will need to do so from the one-click sync button in each of the sections' Schoology gradebooks.
Visibility Settings
You may want to Hide the overall grades in student grade report and Hide grading period grades in student grade report if you will be adding additional grading items to PowerSchool directly as the Schoology Gradebook will calculate an overall grade if you have any graded items. This would show a different overall grade and potentially confuse students and parents .
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Hide overall grades in student grade report excludes an overall score from student reports and the students' Grades tab in the course. This may be a suitable option if your school does not report overall grades for the course across multiple grading periods.
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Hide grading period grades in student grade report excludes grading period scores from student reports and the students' Grades tab in the course. You cannot customize which grading period grades you hide or display. Hiding the grading period grade from student reports also hides the category-level grades from the student report.
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Hide total points achieved in student grade report excludes total points achieved from student reports and the students' Grades tab in the course.
Note: If you hide the overall grade, the student does not see any overall grade in your course. Students see neither the calculated grade nor the score you enter in the override column when you select Hide overall grades from student reports. This also applies to hiding and overriding grading period grades.
FAQs and Known Limitations
The integration does not currently allow mapping of attendance.
If you make changes to the assignment name, due date, total points, or description in Schoology AFTER the assignment has been created and passed to PowerTeacher Pro from Schoology, you may see unspecified sync errors. Please delete in PowerTeacher Pro and resync the item in Schoology.
The integration does not support percentage-based calculations. All scores in PowerTeacher Pro calculate as Total Points. Please keep this in mind when configuring category weights in Schoology.
If an item is ungraded in Schoology, the item will not sync with PowerSchool.
Unpublished items may cause discrepancies in matching gradebooks.
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Error messages: In general, the best practice is to attempt a re-sync event if the status of the sync is Error.
If you continue to see a sync error, you can delete the item in PowerSchool. Return to Schoology and add a small change to the title of the Schoology assignment and then let the system wide sync take place.
The sync is a one-way direction; from Schoology to PowerSchool only. If you add something to PowerSchool it will NOT sync back to Schoology and the overall calculated grades will NOT match.
If you manually add a grade in PowerTeacher Pro to an assignment that was passed to PowerSchool from Schoology, future syncs from Schoology may no longer work.
If you need to delete an assignment, do it in PowerTeacher Pro and then Schoology. Deleting in Schoology will NOT delete the assignment in PowerSchool
Time to Sync:
The Sync All icon in the gradebook can typically take up to several hours.
The best practice is for teachers to re-sync individual assignments as desired only if they see the red notification icon in the Schoology Gradebook:
The integration currently does not support syncing PowerTeacher Pro Standards-Based Grading data in PowerTeacher Pro.
If the lead instructor is changed in PowerSchool, this may remove the category configurations. The new instructor will need to configure categories from the PowerTeacher Pro App.