A gradebook that knows your standards

Not a standards tracker bolted onto a gradebook. One place where the marks you enter answer the question "which standards have I actually assessed?" without being entered twice.

Written by a practising Ontario teacher · Last reviewed: October 2026

Why the spreadsheet always dies

The standards grid starts in August, colour-coded and complete. By October it is a record of what you meant to assess. Nobody is lazy; the grid simply asks you to enter the same information twice, and the second entry is the one that gets skipped when a prep period disappears.

That matters more than it sounds, because a stale coverage map is worse than none. None makes you think. Stale makes you confident about a gap that is not there, or blind to one that is.

The fix is not discipline. It is removing the second entry.

How it works, concretely

You tag an assessment with the standards it assesses — once, when you create it. Everything after that is derived.

A real example

A kindergarten counting quiz, tagged with two standards from the Counting and Cardinality domain:

K.CC.A.1Count to 100 by ones and by tens.
K.CC.A.2Count forward beginning from a given number within the known sequence.

Enter the marks. Both standards now show as assessed, with the class average against each, and the rest of the domain shows as a gap — because it is one.

The standards themselves are the official ones, with their official identifiers, not a paraphrase someone typed in. Math and ELA, kindergarten through high school, plus the anchor standards and the mathematical practices.

It is still a gradebook

This is the part standards-tracking tools usually get wrong: they are trackers, and you still need a gradebook, so now you have two systems. Level Up Classroom is the gradebook. Standards are a dimension of it.

• Categories and weights you define, including percentage, points, or a four-point scale.
• Attendance, seating, and a class stream, in the same place as the marks.
• Import a roster from Google Classroom, or a tab-delimited file, or type it.
• Export marks when your school asks for them in its own format.

If standards tracking turned out to be the thing you did not use, you would still have a gradebook. That is deliberate.

You pick your own grade band

A fourth-grade teacher does not need all 19,000-odd standards in a dropdown. You choose a document when you set the class up — math K–8, ELA K–5, high school math, and so on — and the picker offers that one.

Teaching two preps in one room? A class can carry two documents at once, labelled separately, which is the case most tools pretend does not exist.

Frequently asked questions

Is this free?

There is a free tier with no credit card, and it includes curriculum alignment. Paid plans raise the class and student caps and add AI generation. Pricing is on the pricing page.

Are the standards the official text?

Yes — the official wording and the official identifiers, from the Common Core State Standards as published. They are reproduced under the CCSS Public License, with the copyright notice the licence requires.

Do I have to tag every assignment?

No. Tag the assessments where coverage matters to you. An untagged quiz is still a graded quiz; it just does not contribute to the coverage map.

What if my district uses its own standards?

Common Core and the Ontario curriculum are built in. Anything else you can still grade — the gradebook does not require a standards document — but it will not have a coverage map.

Does it do standards-based report cards?

It reports coverage and per-standard averages, and exports marks. It does not generate a district standards-based report card form.

Standards-based grading without a second spreadsheet
Easy grader — free, no account
How this differs from Google Classroom

The part that usually gets dropped

Standards tracking only survives if it is a by-product of marking.

Every teacher who has kept a standards spreadsheet has abandoned one. It fails for the same reason every time: it is a second place to enter the same information, so it goes stale in week three and then it lies to you.

Level Up Classroom derives coverage from the marks you already entered. You tag an assessment with the standards it assesses once, and the gaps appear on their own — per strand, per student, from the gradebook you were going to fill in anyway.

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A gradebook that does this for you

Level Up Classroom tracks achievement and learning skills together, and drafts report card comments from the marks you have already entered. Free to start.

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