Motivation management with GradeFix
Gradefix is a Web-based organizational tool aimed at students who want to organize their schoolwork in a virtual assignment book. Users simply add their assignment info, and Gradefix prioritizes the projects that need their attention. Could this be simpler than a hard-copy day planner? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
Gradefix separates schoolwork into four categories: homework, reading, quiz study, and exam study. Sorely lacking is scheduling for lab work and study groups, two activities that most college students likely would add to their schedules. In that regard, Gradefix seems suited more to the high school crowd.
(Credit: CNET Networks)After adding a new task, Gradefix will plot out when you need to work on it based on when it's due, how long you think it will take, and your total daily time budgeted for homework. Work is presented by week, with color coding for each class. One obvious problem with this system is that some assignments might need to be done in one sitting, and can't be split up.
What's cool about Gradefix is that missing an assignment automatically re-arranges the the rest of your priorities. The tool will automatically put the missed task at the top of your daily queue, and adjust how much additional time needs to be spent to make up for a lost day.
Gradefix is an interesting take on project management, but compared to a hard-copy day planner, I think it's asking too much for students to log in and input assignments every day when they'll likely have to write them down in class anyway. I'd also worry about reliability -- will the service be running when I need it? Gradefix is fairly easy to use, but as far as building strong study skills, I don't think it beats writing things down on a piece of paper.
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
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Let me first set the facts straight Gradefix.com is more of college and university app than it is a high school app. Our user base is proof that, more than 90% of our users are college and universities students. We also have a large number of users that are graduate students (particularly law and medicine).
The second fact is there are many more categories other than lab and group study as you mentioned. To name a few there are reports, papers, projects, problems, surveys, interviews, research, art projects, and music compositions. We very well could add a huge list of types of tasks. The problem with adding all of those types of tasks is that it would severely slow down the process of entering tasks. The solution is that you can just put it in as homework and label it in the description box. We are open to other potential solutions that you can think of keep in mind task entering speed up though.
I would like to also address your comment of doing a task in one sitting. There are several solutions to this problem. First, just do the task in one sitting. Then when you go to update your tasks check off that task, and all the tasks you neglected will be reorganized into your schedule when you click update. Second, very soon we will have we will have ICAL/.ics feeds. It will be easy to export your schedule out and then you can move that one task together. We could make it so you can just schedule in one place, the downside to that is that it will make the interface for inputting tasks more complex for the user. However, if the users demand this feature, we are certainly open to the idea. Up to this point, we have only had you and a couple of other students that have had any interest in this.
Lastly, we have a hard time with your conclusion that scheduling by paper is more effective. The thing that is so amazing about Gradefix is the algorithm that works underneath the app. The Gradefix algorithm factors how much time the student has to complete their tasks, what the student wants as their ideal study time per task to be, it factors missed assignments, it factors in continuity of assignments, and then it finally factors in priority of tasks placing most weight on study for exams and quizzes. So to say paper and pencil is more effective to me is like saying man can calculate faster than computer. For example, say you have five large tasks and to do them reasonably you would break them into maybe 20 smaller tasks. You are also limited by the time you have available. With a conventional planner you make 20 entries by hand and your will need to calculate the ideal place to put them. On top of that if you miss tasks you will be required to redo the entire schedule. We think the convention planner approach is a waste of time. Gradefix can make these distributions only the time it takes you to enter five tasks and updating missed tasks is much faster. So I have a hard time seeing how using paper and pencil will beat us. If you would like to race, tell us when and we will take that challenge. Granted we think we have a bit of an advantage, because we have spent the last two years perfecting our solution.
I apologize for coming off kind of hard on your review. We just want to set the facts straight about our app. What I take away from this is that we need to figure how to better explain our how to use Gradefix.
We are a small shop and have only been launched for four months and have users now in over 30 countries. Everyday we work to make the product better and have somewhat neglected our help section in the process. Our copywriter is currently editing our FAQ, which should improve our help section. My concern though is that most people don't read the FAQ. We have made several help videos that are now obsolete because of our interface improvements in the last few months. We are currently working on another interface improvement, so making more videos at this point seems a bit futile. We are open to ideas of how we can make a good help section. Do you have any ideas on how we could better communicate how to use the app? Maybe you could think of some sites you could refer us to that have good help sections/tutorials we could model after. Once again we appreciate the press, good or bad it brings users to our site.
Best Regards,
Mark Polson
CEO Cofounder
Gradefix.com