One of the trickiest, and most important thing about succeeding in college is dealing with long term assignments. Though the usual way of dealing with such assignments usually wins out (you know, staying up all night before to finish), GradeFix helps you pace your work over a length of time, ideally avoiding these all-nighters.
GradeFix is a service that essentially breaks down information you give it in a way that is usable. Instead of you guessing what homework to give priority to, when to get started, or how much time you need to study - GradeFix does all of this for you. And not only does it do all this, it’s incredibly simple to use and maintain. And this has simply gotten easier as they have recently added RSS feeds and iCal feeds to allow you to incorporate your daily tasks into Outlook, iCal, GoogleCal or 30boxes (or any other service that can make use of these formats.)
I’ll break down how it works when you actually use the service.
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Signing & Setting Up
Signing up couldn’t be simpler. You pick a free or pay plan ($5 a month, no contract). The biggest difference in these is how far in advance you can plan out GradeFix. The free version only gives you 10 events out, which really isn’t terribly useful if you have any sort of standard amount of assignments. The pay version is free for the first 30 days, and is the only way you’ll really get a strong sense of the service.
After that, you put in pretty standard info (user name, password, email, school, etc) and then go onto the customization. This is where the real genius of GradeFix comes in; you put in how many hours you wish to study each day (from 0 to whatever). Then you put in your classes (as many as you need).
Then you’re good to go! The most onerous part of the process (though unavoidable) is actually sticking your assignments in en massse. I just take out my syllabuses and start putting it all in (this is a bit more problematic for me as I’m taking three courses without a lot of structure.) Still, you pick the class, the type of work (homework, reading, quiz study, exam study), the due date, description and - most importantly - the time estimate.
The time estimate is the key to the entire thing, and the trickiest part for the user to work out. For instance, when I first setup my account I vastly underestimated reading times because I used my standard reading speed and not my “study reading speed.” But, you get this worked out soon enough.
After that, you can adjust how much time you want to spend on certain types of work in blocks (say you only want to read in blocks of 30 minutes each). GradeFix then presents you with your schedule for the next 1-180 days of what you need to do each day to get everything done on time. It will, of course, also put time in beyond your normal study schedule if necessary, and will move up assignments you did not finish on time. 
You can also add more or subtract assignments at will, and GradeFix will automatically adjust itself accordingly.
As you use GradeFix you simply mark off a project as complete it, and when you login it will often ask you to check overdue tasks to see if you have completed them. You can also have it list information all by type or by class.
Final Notes
Generally speaking, I’d give GradeFix 4 out of 5 stars if we’re using such things. It is a great piece of software, though it still has a ways to go. The biggest problem it suffers from is portability, though the recent addition of iCal feeds has helped this immensely. I, personally, cannot get that particular aspect to work with iCal, but others seem to have no trouble (and it works great with GoogleCal or 30boxes, which I use anyway.)
The printing function still needs a bit of cleaning up (I tend to print out a week at a time and stick it up above my desk.) It also needs a way to “chain events” as I often have to manually work around things like finishing reading a book before I start a paper on it. But ultimately, I have few complaints - it’s a great piece of work and I use it daily. Blocking study time is very important, I find, and this method works best with such methods.
17/07/2007 at 10:47 pm Permalink
Hi ! Your site is very interesting. Thank you.
;)