Grades and homework troubleshooting

Why report card publish is blocked for the whole class, why a teacher cannot enter marks, and why corrected marks do not change a published card.

Getting started guide for day and boarding schools.

Last updated August 29, 2026

Grades has three layers that people routinely confuse. Subject teachers prepare marks for the class and subject they are assigned to. Homeroom teachers consolidate the whole class and add remarks. Leadership publishes. Homework sits alongside all of it with its own draft and published state. Work out which layer a complaint belongs to first, because the fix lives in a different place for each.

Permission problem or configuration problem?

A permission problem returns 403 and is tied to the teacher assignment record for the current academic year, not to the Teacher role: a teacher with the right role and no assignment is refused, and the refusal follows them across every screen for that class. A configuration problem is a 400 that names data - missing marks, no active students, no grading scale - and reproduces identically for a Principal. The quickest test is to ask a homeroom teacher of a different class to try: if they are blocked in the same way, it is data.

Publishing to families

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Publish refused with MISSING_MARKS	At least one student has an empty subject	Read the notReady list on the response, fill the named subjects at /grades, then publish the class and term again.
Publish button missing for a class teacher	Publish is leadership-only	A homeroom teacher gets readiness and remarks; Platform Admin, Admin, Principal, or Vice Principal presses publish at /grades/report-cards.
Family sees nothing after a successful publish	No guardian portal login	Notifications only reach guardian records whose userId points at an active user. Issue the login at /parents.
Grade letter looks wrong	Scale boundaries	The scale comes from school settings at /settings/grading-scale and falls back to a default CBSE scale when unset. Change it, then republish - existing snapshots keep the old letter.

Homework

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Students and parents see no homework	The assignment was saved as a draft	New assignments are created unpublished unless publish is chosen; the publish timestamp is written only at that point. Publish it at /assignments.
Due reminders never sent	The daily job is not installed	Reminders come from POST /api/homework-assignments/due-reminders/run, called by scripts/run-school-cron.sh with FEES_CRON_SECRET. Nothing inside the application runs on a timer.
Parent looking at the wrong child	Child-scoped URL	Families read homework at /parent-dashboard/homework with the child in the query string. Ask them to open the notification rather than an old tab.

Common questions

Quick answers in plain language.

Report card publish fails with MISSING_MARKS. Does it really block the whole class?+

Yes. Readiness is all-or-nothing: publish is refused unless every actively enrolled student in the class has a mark for every subject on the card. The response returns each student who is not ready together with the subject names that are empty, so work through that list rather than guessing. A class with no active students is refused separately with a 404.

Marks were corrected after publishing but the report card still shows the old figure. Why?+

Publishing writes a frozen snapshot per student, and the PDF and family view read that snapshot rather than live aggregation. Correcting a mark afterwards changes the gradebook and nothing else. Publish the class and term again to rewrite the snapshots.

Which teachers can enter marks for a class?+

Platform Admin, the office Admin role, Principal, and Vice Principal for any class. A homeroom teacher for their own class across every subject. A subject teacher only where an active teacher assignment for the current academic year links them to that class and subject. An assignment from last year does not carry over.

Can a homeroom teacher publish report cards for their own class?+

No. Homeroom teachers can view the whole class, write remarks, and check publish readiness, but publishing, unpublishing, and school-wide export are limited to Platform Admin, the office Admin role, Principal, and Vice Principal.