Throughout the week I have been receiving emails and blog comments about problems with Engrade. Earlier this week there were times when Engrade was exceptionally slow and some users reported not being able to access their accounts at all. As of Thursday at 11am EST I was still able to access my account. This morning I awoke to blog comments and emails asking me if I knew what happened to Engrade. The entire Engrade website is down, there is not even a “fail” message or a status page from Engrade. As of 12:10pm EST I have not heard anything from Engrade regarding the problems they are experiencing.

For teachers who have their grades on Engrade and no where else the failure of Engrade is a huge problem. In many school districts around the country today is the end of the first marking period. I feel awful for those of you that use Engrade. If you started using Engrade after I wrote my review of it August I feel partly responsible for your situation. I do try to avoid reviewing services that I think are not going to be viable in the long-run. I never suspected Engrade of being a service that would disappear almost overnight.

This problem with Engrade is an example of why some school districts prefer to host their own student management systems rather than rely on others. That said, two years ago my school district’s servers crashed and took grades with them. The grades were recovered eventually, but it was iffy for a few days. Since then I have printed my grade reports every time I update my grade book.