During the COVID-19 Pandemic and school closures, some districts are empowering parents to choose their students current term grade to be either a letter grade (A-F) or a pass/fail grade. 


Aeries does not have a built-in solution providing a option for parents to choose the preferred term grade type for their student. Additionally, there may be equity or other unknown ramifications to consider since some students will be issued letter grades and others a pass/fail grade. This affects areas such as GPA, class ranking, and meeting college entrance requirements. 


Understanding the direction of many districts during the unprecedented pandemic, Aeries does support grading for a combined letter and pass/fail term grading. Appropriate Valid Marks need to be configured. See the following link for more information:


https://support.aeries.com/support/solutions/articles/14000067737-grade-reporting-update-valid-marks  


Many districts are looking at surveying parents outside of Aeries tools. This data can be imported into a selected Aeries User Code, Supplemental fields, or custom tables. Using Import Data into Aeries could be useful to import the data (as long as student key is provided). See more Import Data into Aeries information below:


https://support.aeries.com/support/solutions/articles/14000102033-import-data-into-aeries 


Once data is in Aeries, queries can be generated and distributed to teachers to select the appropriate grading type when entering term grades.


As an alternative to a survey to your parents, a custom table to collect this data could be created, and exposed to parents for a given time period via the parent portal. Some ideas on how to disseminate this to your parents could include a custom message added to the Global Web Messages prompting the parent to complete the form. They could also be sent an email with a specific hyperlink directly to the page. Lastly, the parent access restrictions could be utilized to temporarily "force" parents to complete the form.