As a student at HSMSE, you are obsessed with your grades. Every second, you’re making sure you don’t have any grades below a 90. In middle school, you may have used softwares such as JumpRope, PupilPath, and Gamma (Teachhub) to check your grades and see work. Now, you use Jupiter Ed (Jupiter). It may not seem problematic at first, with simple capabilities and navigation UI, but it is one of the most inefficient softwares out there. Although widely used in our school, Jupiter is not the only place you can check your grades. There is also Google Classroom, which the majority of teachers at HSMSE use instead of Jupiter. But some teachers use both, or they just use Jupiter. This can cause major confusion for students, as we now have to juggle assignments posted on Google Classroom and Jupiter. Any HSMSE student can tell you that our school’s grading system is a complete mess. But where did Jupiter come from, and why is it so bad?

Jupiter Ed was founded in Silicon Valley in 2004 by former teacher David Hundsness. Initially, it was a web-based gradebook created by Hundsness for his own use, but he decided to share it with his peers and it quickly became popular with other teachers. Now, more than 20 years later, 4.5 million students use Jupiter nationwide! But not without them complaining about its problems. To start off, Jupiter has timed sessions which log you out every five minutes when you open a new tab. Secondly, uploading images takes much longer compared to Google Classroom. The JUNO doc feature works just like a Google doc, but with fewer features that are harder to use. Even logging in is hard, as you have to put your username, password, school, city, and state. Worst of all, you can’t receive notifications for assignments when a teacher gives grades or even work. 

Only three years ago, HSMSE wasn’t using Jupiter at all. In fact, in the 2022–23 school year, HSMSE exclusively used Google Classroom. Before the pandemic, HSMSE cycled through many different grading sites including EnGrade, PupilPath, and many more. During the pandemic, like many other schools across the city, HSMSE began using Google Classroom, but we kept using it until the 2023–24 school year. So why did we switch to Jupiter? Well, Google Classroom has certain privacy features that make it hard for the DOE to access our grades. The switch to Jupiter made things easier from the perspective of the school administration. It is much easier for them to make report cards, and access student grades. “Its easily accessible, [and] parents can see all the grades,” says Mr. Zara. But many HSMSE teachers don’t like Jupiter. “Jupiter requires so many different screens, so much clicking … it’s so much easier to access and submit [grades] all through Google Classroom,” Ms. Hesseltine says. Like many teachers, Ms. Hesseltine doesn’t input her grades on Jupiter until the very end of each marking period, which makes Google Classroom a much more accurate representation for your grades. As we can see, Jupiter is very controversial. But what do students think?

I interviewed two students at HSMSE asking about their problems with Jupiter. “[Jupiter] logs you out every time you try to do anything, or leave for a few seconds,” Yuri Cortazar (’28) says. “Not every teacher uses it … and it’s just another thing to check, which makes a student’s life harder.” And, when asked how many teachers used each software, Davin Chen (’28) remarked, “Only 2 of my classes use Jupiter … I would like it if only Google Classroom [were] used because I am more used to it.” The reason for teachers using both Jupiter and Google Classroom is because the school asks for teachers to keep double gradebooks, one on each platform. But after spending the entire pandemic with Google Classroom, students are much better at using it than we are at using Jupiter.

There is no easy solution to this dilemma. However, there are ways to make things easier for us as students. One thing teachers can do to help students get work in on time is to send out reminders on Google Classroom for work on Jupiter, since we don’t get notifications from Jupiter. Teachers could also coordinate with each other about where and when they post their work, since consistency between teachers leads to less confusion. Overall, it is clear that there are many problems with Jupiter. It is clunky, logs you out super often, and doesn’t send you notifications when work is posted. It is still a problem that needs to be solved for future HSMSE students. For now, though, we must stay on top of our heavy workload. One conclusion we can draw is that Jupiter is stupider than Google Classroom!