Generate and email report cards

A report card is the formal grade summary you send home to a family at the end of a term or year. In MarkTrack you build a reusable report card template (what the card says, which marks and sections it shows), then generate cards for one student, a whole class, or the entire year — and either download them or email them straight to families. This guide walks both halves: setting up a template, and producing and sending the cards.

Report cards are per school and tied to an academic year. MarkTrack always uses your current academic year unless you choose another, and it pulls each student's grades from that year's terms. To understand how the grades on the card are calculated, read How grades and report cards are calculated.

To add written comments that print on the card, open the class Gradebook → Actions → Report Card → Comments. Choose Whole year or a term, save the comments, then preview or generate a PDF to verify them. These report-card comments are separate from assignment feedback comments.

Step 1 — Build a report card template

A template decides what every card looks like. Click Report Builder in the sidebar and then Report Cards in the page header. There are three ways to make a template:

• Build with AI → Start from scratch — describe the card you want (or leave the box empty and let MarkTrack choose), click Generate 4 options, then pick one with Use this & edit. Every option is built from your school's own classes and grading periods. Its preview uses a real student, and fills any term that has no grades yet with example numbers so you can see the finished look.
• Build with AI → From a card you already use — upload the PDF report card your school sends home today (up to 10 MB, three pages) and click Build editable draft. AI rebuilds it as an editable card connected to your real data, checks its printed result against your sample, and leaves you a draft to review.
• New Template — opens the designer straight away on a starter card built from your school's grading periods and marks.

Either way you finish the card in the designer:

1. Click the card's name at the top (or the pencil beside it) to rename it — for example, "Semester Report Card".
2. Edit the heading, columns and sections directly on the card. The values you see are one real student's marks; pick another student from the list under the name to check how the card reads for them.
3. Click Preview PDF to see exactly what will print.
4. Click Save & publish so the template can be used to generate cards. Before a card is published, Save keeps it as a draft; once it is published, the button reads Save & keep published and every save changes the live card.

To change a template later, click Design on it in the templates list. A template made before the designer existed still prints exactly as it always has; it only changes once you save it in the designer, and the designer warns you about that when you open one.

Preview before you commit

From the templates list, click Preview to open a real PDF of the saved card using one of your students' actual grades; in the designer, Preview PDF prints the card as it stands, saved or not. This is the fastest way to check a card before generating it for everyone. On the list, each template shows its layout type, a Published badge when live, and Design, Preview, and delete actions. Cards made in the designer — including ones built with AI from a PDF — are published from the designer with Save & publish; once published, every save changes the live card. A card made before the designer existed is published from its tile on the list with Publish. Any published card can be taken back with Unpublish on its tile.

Step 2 — Choose what you need and generate

On the Report Cards page, find Download cards. Pick your Template from the dropdown (only published templates appear), then under What do you need? choose one:

• One student — pick them from the Student list. You get a single PDF.
• A whole class — every student in one class. Pick the class. You get a zip file of PDFs, one per student.
• Everyone this year — every student in the school for the current academic year, in one zip file. It can take several minutes.

To email cards instead of downloading them, use Send report cards (Step 4).

1. Click what you need, fill in the list that appears, then click Download PDF for one student, or Download zip for a class or the whole year.

Step 3 — Wait for the job, then download

Generating cards is a background job, so the page doesn't freeze while it works. After you click the download button, a status line appears:

1. You'll see Building the cards…. A class or full-year zip can take a little while because it renders one PDF per student.
2. When it finishes, a Download what we built link appears. Click it to get your PDF or zip.
3. If something goes wrong, a red message under the button explains what happened.

Step 4 — Send report cards to parents and students

Instead of downloading and forwarding cards yourself, MarkTrack can email them straight to families. Click Send report cards at the top of the Report Cards page (it appears once a template is published). The window walks three steps: Choose, Review, Send.

1. Choose — pick the Template and Academic year, then Who gets a card: Everyone this year, One class or One student. Under Send to, tick Parents, Students, or both. The counts at the bottom update as you choose.
2. Review — nothing is sent until you have seen the list. Who it goes to shows every address that will be written to, with whose card each email carries; anyone who would not get one is listed with the reason spelled out, so you can fix the gaps first. What it looks like shows the real card for each student; step through them with the arrows.
3. Send — click Send, or Download all as ZIP to get the same cards for printing. Sending carries on in the background, so you can close the window. When it finishes it says Report cards sent (or Sent, with some problems), and the send is kept under Recently sent: what was sent, by whom, and who didn't receive one.

Step 5 — Understand the concluded-year lock

When you conclude an academic year, MarkTrack freezes that year's report-card grades so the cards stay exactly as they were the day the year closed. Re-generating a concluded year's report card reproduces the same numbers even if a class is later edited — the card is a permanent record, not a live recalculation.

• Concluding a year also flips its classes to read-only, so grades can't be changed after the fact.
• If you genuinely need to change a concluded year's grades, an admin can reopen the year, which unfreezes the grades again. See Set up academic years and terms for how concluding and reopening work.