WOODBURY — Most students have gotten stressed, at least once, from waiting for a grade to be put into PowerSchool. But, from the teacher’s perspective, it’s not always so simple as just entering grades in.

“We want you guys to get your tests back immediately,” Kristen Pisano, a teacher in the Math department at NHS says. “If I had it my way, you’d get it back the next day. That’s how we want it too.”

Students are always wondering why it takes teachers a while to grade things. It’s never just one thing though. It’s many different reasons that cause assignments to take longer to grade. One of those reasons being the sheer number of details that each assignment includes. 

“When you’re grading things like essays or a summative assignment, as an English teacher, you’re looking at all the grammar and sentence structure and spelling.” Rebecca Gamberdella, a teacher in the English department at NHS says, “It can take a while to get through 150 of them.”

For the English department, they have to check many little things in writing, and when there are over a hundred of the same assignment and each one is different, it adds up to a lot of grading time. 

Pisano says, “Usually for a quiz, it takes me about two hours for 3 classes, but if all 5 classes take it at the same time, then it’s probably three hours.”

The Math department has to grade repetitive assignments constantly. Even though it should be quick and easy, it gets tedious.

Delays in grades can frustrate students, especially near the end of the quarter. “One time a teacher forgot to grade my stuff and then the quarter ended,” Armanie Sylvester, a freshman, says. “Then it was two weeks past the deadline and they never graded it, even though I turned it in.” 

For some students it can affect their grades for the quarter, but for others it doesn’t affect them at all. Owen Wolff, a freshman at Nonnewaug, says, “Waiting for grades doesn’t stress me out. They have never affected my overall grades.”

Others disagree; they think it depends on the class. Lucy Oster, a freshman, says, “Waiting for grades in PowerSchool can stress me out, especially in classes that I know I do very well in, because I hold myself to a high expectation.”

Skylar Prihoda, a freshman. says, “If I feel like I did bad on something, I’ll feel stressed, but otherwise, I’m not stressed about my grades.”