PowerSchool grades live in the Student and Parent portal, and every school district has its own copy of it. That's the first thing to know: there's no single PowerSchool login page. You sign in through your district's portal or the PowerSchool Mobile app, and the grades you see are whatever your teachers have entered.
Here's how to find your grades, read the page, and work out what the symbols mean, drawn from PowerSchool's own guides.
Weighted categories, percentages or points.
Find your school's PowerSchool portal
PowerSchool's Parent and Student Resource Center explains that each school or district has its own portal, usually linked from a parent or student section of the school website. If you can't find it, search "[your school or district] student PowerSchool."
Students and parents have separate logins. A parent account can link several children and see all of them in one place. If you never received login details, the school office issues them, not PowerSchool. Our guide to the PowerSchool district code walks through creating a parent account and adding your children.
Check your grades and attendance on the web
Sign in, and the first page is Grades and Attendance. PowerSchool's portal user guide describes what's there and how to drill down.
- The Grades and Attendance page lists every class with a grade for each term.
- Click a grade in a term column. The Class Score Detail page opens, showing every assignment in that class and the score on each.
- Click an assignment to open its description, due date and any teacher comments.
- Use the browser Back button to return to the main page.
Two other pages are worth knowing. Grade History shows final grades from past terms. Standards Grades, where your school uses it, shows how you're doing against specific learning standards rather than as one percentage, and you can toggle completed classes on or off.
Check your grades in the PowerSchool app
The PowerSchool Mobile app shows the same information, and PowerSchool's resource center notes it gives instant access to attendance, assignments, scores and grades. Sign in with the same details as the web portal. Your district may need to enable app access first, and the app asks for your district code the first time, which our district code guide shows you how to find.
Parents can turn on email or push notifications for grades and assignments in Account Preferences, so a new score arrives without logging in.
Symbols next to your grades
PowerSchool marks some scores with symbols. The two that change your grade are the caret (^), which means a score is exempt from the final grade, and the asterisk (*), which means an assignment isn't counted. If a class average looks higher or lower than you expected, one of those is usually why.
For every symbol, flag and code, including the number one (1), Excluded and term columns like Q1, S1 and Y1, see PowerSchool grade codes explained.
Why your PowerSchool grade might look wrong
PowerSchool's resource center is clear that features such as GPA, assignment grades and schedules are configured school by school by the district's administrators. So if you can't see a GPA or a category breakdown, it's likely switched off for your school, not missing. Our guide to checking your GPA on PowerSchool covers where it appears when it is turned on.
A few other common causes:
- The teacher hasn't entered or published the score yet. A gradebook total can lag the graded work by days.
- The class uses category weighting, so a low quiz average pulls harder than a low homework average. The "1" symbol is your hint.
- Grades that sync from another system, such as an online learning platform, can take a day to update.
If a score is wrong rather than late, the fix is with the teacher. PowerSchool support can't change a grade.
Working out what you need
PowerSchool tells you where you stand. It doesn't tell you what you need. For that, take the numbers across:
- The class percentage and the final's weight go into the final grade calculator, which gives the score you need on the final for the grade you want.
- The category percentages and their weights go into the weighted grade calculator to check the class total or try a what-if.
- Term letter grades and credits go into the GPA calculator if your school doesn't show a GPA in the portal.
And if you're a teacher grading a stack of tests before they go into PowerSchool, the grade calculator turns questions wrong into a percentage in one step, and our PowerTeacher Pro guide covers entering and finalizing grades.