Reedy High School student George Thayamkery recently created an app that allows students to bypass Home Access Center in order to check their grades, but the district has reservations about students using the application.

“We’ve got a couple of concerns with the app,” technology facilitator Jeff Wiseman said. “The first thing is that we can’t guarantee that the grade and grade calculations and the GPA that’s being shown through that app is correct, because it’s not coming directly from our information systems. It may look correct, but there’s a lot of backend math that happens. So we don’t want students to look at it and say ‘oh cool, I’ve got a 4.0 now,’ and then really it’s not doing the right math. We just don’t want that false sense of hope.”

The app was created by Thayamkery as a way for students to check their grades and calculate their GPA without going through the Home Access Center. However, with the app requiring users to input their HAC username and password, Wiseman is concerned with where this information is going.

“It’s just not a good practice for us to go and put our username and password into an app or a website that we don’t know who it’s from,” Wiseman said. “I’m sure that the guy over at Reedy is a great person. I’m sure he’s not doing anything wrong, but we never know.”

Wiseman is encouraging students to use the HAC and district approved app instead of the one created by Thayamkery as the app is secure. The app is available on the Apple App Store and on the Google Play Store for Android users.

“If the app was from somebody who wanted to do bad things, the app could be collecting usernames and passwords,” Wiseman said. “Now that person has access to your grades and your GPA and all of your personal information with your address and your phone number and your email.”