Class Rank Reports

To get a class rank report in PowerSchool, there a few different steps that need to be set up before the reports will properly run, with the correct students and rank calculation criteria.

From PowerSchool admin:

• With district office selected…

  • District Management > Academics > GPA > GPA Calculation Methods

    • From here, depending on how your district has been set up, you will either see many different methods listed, or very few. Usually there are handful that all schools have, such as ‘Simple’ and ‘Cumulative’. Custom methods can be setup and signified by their descriptions. If you do not know what method you need, ‘Simple’ is usually a good place to start, and you can work up from there.

    • If different schools have varying methods by which they would like to calculate GPA, or would like a specific GPA calculation to be used for a class ranking report, a method will need to be set up here and assigned to the school in question.

  • GPA calculation methods must be applied within their respective edit menus to the grade, schools, and terms needed.

    • There are many examples online for GPA calculation formulas.

    • Keep in mind these formulas only work if grades are properly calculated, entered, and stored.

After setting up your desired GPA calculation method and making sure it is applied to the school, grade levels, and terms for which you want to run a class rank report, move from the District Office menu to the school in question…

• With the school selected…

  • School Management > Academics > Class Rank > Class Rank Methods

    • Class Rank Methods can be generated as part of a list with predetermined settings, much like GPA Calculation Methods, though much less complicated. Your school may already have a number of Class Rank methods set up, or they may use a base template and edit it according to their needs whenever a report needs to be run.

    • Selecting the GPA Calculation Method you created/edited earlier will do the bulk of the work in determining if these reports come out correctly.

    • Some of the options in this menu are bit sneaky:

      • If you have students who need to be excluded from a class rank report, they will need to be individually excluded from their student profile, and the box next to ‘Exclude Students’ on the Class Rank Method page will also need to be checked.

        • This also includes early graduates.

      • Courses and grades can be toggled as counting towards class rank in their individual pages. If you have courses like this, make sure to select the ‘Only include grades that count in class rank’ box on the Class Rank Method page.

Class rank can be calculated in a number of different ways. Many districts set it to calculate whenever grades are stored, while others can have it set to daily, weekly, or never, manually recalculating when the need arises. These settings can be found in the ‘Recalculation Frequency’ page right beneath ‘Class Rank Methods’ in School Management > Academics.

Whenever changes are made to a class rank method or GPA calculation settings, the ranks will need to be recalculated in order to reflect any changes. You can do this manually by clicking the ‘Recalculate now' button in the Recalculation Frequency page, or just wait for the next day/week/grade store etc. depending on what is present in the dropdown. Depending on how big your school is, this can take few minutes to process.

Once everything has been selected and recalculation has been run, you can freely generate a class rank report and see if any changes need to be made in your configurations. The first place to check would be the Class Rank Methods, then GPA Calculation Methods.