Gradeient

Before I started Gradeient in 2024, another student in my school district built GradeMelon as an alternative to StudentVUE, the platform used by Montgomery County Public Schools. I used it to explore hypothetical grades and see how upcoming assignments could affect my results.

When changes to StudentVUE disrupted GradeMelon, I wanted to build an alternative for myself and my friends. That led me to investigate how StudentVUE retrieved grade data.

I started by comparing the older XML-based SOAP API with the requests made by the updated StudentVUE interface. Using Burp Suite to inspect network traffic, I found that the newer endpoints I was investigating used a different approach.

I spent about a week looking for a structured response containing grades and assignments. I couldn’t find one in the traffic I inspected, so I parsed the grade information from the returned HTML instead.

I designed Gradeient in Figma and built it with SwiftUI in Xcode. It was my first major iOS development project.

The class list shows courses with their letter grades, percentages, and a custom icon and color for each class.

I initially planned to assign icons and colors automatically based on course names: a green beaker for Chemistry, for example, or a red notebook for English. I changed direction because students have their own color-coding habits. Instead, each class has a control for choosing its icon and color.

The class detail view lists assignments and their grades. Students can select an assignment and enter a hypothetical grade to explore how it would affect their result.