Once upon a time, report cards were a big deal—and, often, a big mystery. As “report card day” drew near, many students would grow increasingly anxious. So did parents, wondering if their expectations of their children’s academic performance matched the letter grades that appeared on the report cards.
But these days, the waiting game for grades is over. Online portals, part of learning management systems where all student data live, allow parents and often students, especially middle and high schoolers, to access grades and attendance data in real time—as soon as a teacher records them.
These systems, like Canvas and Moodle, began cropping up around a decade ago. Since then, they have become as routine in most districts as the once-a-semester report card once was. But their usage is not without controversy.
School administrators say the portals improve transparency, streamline parent-teacher communication, and can help students and teachers become more accountable for turning in and grading assignments on time.
But enabling students and parents to access grades around the clock can come with drawbacks, too. It can place undue emphasis on outcomes over the learning process; widen equity gaps as some parents may not feel comfortable with, or have access to, the technology; increase the amount of parent emails teachers receive; and feed student anxiety and stress.
And research shows that academic-related stress is a significant concern for many teens. Denise Pope, the co-founder of nonprofit Challenge Success, which conducts research on K-12 students’ well-being, said her team has, in recent years, surveyed over 400,000 middle- and high school students, asking: What, if anything, causes you stress?
“The No. 1 answer that we get is grades, tests, quizzes, finals, or other assessments,” said Pope, a senior lecturer in Stanford University’s graduate school of education and a former high school English teacher. “That’s from students at rural schools, urban schools, private schools, public schools, and charter schools.”
During the 2024-25 school year, Challenge Success surveyed 23,112 high school students. Sixty-eight percent reported that they stressed about grades and assessments more than other common teen stressors, like family relationships and other home-based problems (which came in at 17%) and romantic relationships (13%).
Portals can increase students’ unhealthy obsession around grades
While 24/7 access to grades may not directly cause an uptick in students’ stress, it can feed an “unhealthy obsession” with grade-checking, say some educators.
Challenge Success surveyed nearly 21,000 high school students in 2024-25 to find out how frequently they checked their grade portals: 24% do so more than once a day; 30%, daily; 28% said weekly; 9%, monthly; 6%, less than once a month; and 4% never do.
Well before the advent of online portals, students tended to focus on grades rather than the more nuanced comments explaining them, Pope said.
When she taught English, “I would put all these comments on students’ papers, and when I would pass them back, the first thing the kids would do is look at the grade,” she said. “Then they’d put it away.”
Now, students often don’t have to wait until teachers physically return a graded assessment before knowing how they did. That has changed the teacher-student dynamic, say some teachers.
“I watched as my 7th graders went from coming to me to talk about assignments and grades, to heading straight to the online portal to hit refresh until a grade appeared,” Emily Cherkin, a former teacher and the founder of the Screen Time Consultant, which advises parents on the harms of kids’ use of digital devices, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Online grade portals fuel parent anxiety, too
Online portals also changed parent behavior associated with grades, Cherkin wrote. Parent emails “piled up” in her inbox once they could view grades at any point during the school year, she said.
That behavior shows the value that some parents place on grades. “Grades can be very, very important in this world. Many people see them as a ticket to your future,” said Pope.
That’s especially true for parents hoping their children gain admission to a highly selective college, she said. In that situation, “monitoring and micromanaging them and getting them to stay on top of their work” often becomes part of the process long before students are actually ready to apply.
Over-reliance on checking grades isn’t what school administrators had in mind when they gave parents and students access to these online portals, some principals said.
“I think of it as just another form of communication,” said Shawn Vincent, principal of Bruce M. Whittier Middle School in Poland, Maine. “It used to be that there was a great mystery. You’d get to the end of the term, and there’d be this question of, ‘How am I doing? How is my kid doing?’ And that’s not how it should be.”
For some parents, he said, more access to grades can generate more questions and, possibly, dissatisfaction. When that happens, Vincent said he invites parents into school for a conversation.
“So much of this is about building trust, and if a parent is relying so heavily on just what they’re seeing in the grade book, and there’s no personal level of relationship with that family—that’s where we have struggled,” Vincent said.
Teaching student accountability
Getting students to take ownership of their work can reduce parent over-involvement. Teaching students good habits around checking their grades is one way to do that.
“We want students to have some level of accountability and responsibility,” Vincent said.
At Arundel High School in Gambrills, Md., students are encouraged in their weekly homeroom sessions to access their grades online, check their GPA and, if warranted, make appointments with teachers to discuss their grades and related topics.
“We really try to advocate for the student trying to solve a problem or ask a question instead of the parent, especially in the upper grades,” said Principal Kimberly Winterbottom said. “And we also encourage parents to have their student be the one who is advocating for themselves.”
Like any tool or resource, online portal users—both students and parents—can benefit from guidance on how best to use it.
For some parents and students, “you’ll want to say, ‘You know, you probably don’t want to be checking it multiple times a day,’ which we have heard of,” Pope said. “And then for others, you might want to say, ‘You know, it might be good every once in a while to hop on there.’”
