Falconium

My sophomore year, the new gradebook platform our school began using, Alma. I, along with lots of students and even teachers, was frustrated by it. But it was like free offered by the state or required by the state or didn't sell students' data or something, so our district stuck with it. My issue with Alma was/is that the number percent grade is only calculated to the ones place, and is truncated by Alma. This means that even if you technically scored a 96.6% in a class, which according to the school's conversion is an A+, Alma will truncate it to a 96% and you'll only get an A. Also, if you're at a 69.9%, failing by one tenth of a point, you would have no idea--you'd think you're still at a 69%. This might not be a big deal in every case, but there are times when it's a problem.

I decided to solve this by making a Python Selenium script which would webscrape all your grades for each class for each assignment, and then would directly divide your percentage grades out to a really precise decimal (like a 22/24 becomes a 0.916666667), and would weight the scores according to the data on the table. The final result would be a really precise number grade for each class.

However...

Only after I programmed the whole script did I bother to read Alma's terms of service. Because they're all about being data-secure, their terms of service say that you can't manually or automatically webscrape content, meaning that I legally can't share my code or technically even use it. So I haven't used it since, and I haven't put it up here for you to access 😢

Oh well. At least I learned important legal rules.

Image credit: the Bow Bot Bout at Bow High School, see here for the source.