Introduction

Welcome to GradesFirst, your home for staying connected with your advisors, tutors, and professors.  The various staffs at both UWF and GradesFirst hope you enjoy using this software and find it essential to helping you manage your daily student activities.  Within this application you will find a powerful combination of features that focus on helping UWF staff assist you so that you may achieve all of your collegiate goals.

Among other things, GradesFirst allows students to

• Request and schedule appointments with advisors and tutors without having to contact or visit these offices
• Integrate Google Calendar with GradesFirst so that you can have all of your calendars in one place

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GradesFirst and Google Calendar

When you integrate your Google Calendar with GradesFirst, your tutors and advisors will be able to schedule appointments for you without your having to contact those offices.  Since some offices already require students to integrate their calendars and set their availability, you should save yourself some time and effort by reviewing both of the links below as soon as you can:

• Integrating GradesFirst with Google Calendar – Integrate the class schedule, tutoring appointments, and advising appointments that appear in GradesFirst with your Google Calendar.
• Integrating Google Calendar with GradesFirst – Integrate your personal Google Calendar with GradesFirst so that tutors, professors, and advisors can see when you're available and when you're busy.  They will not be able to see the details of the events that you created in Google Calendar.

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Advising Centers

One of the features of GradesFirst is to allow students to schedule and request appointments with their advisors, and to make sure that the process for scheduling and requesting appointments with one advisor or department is the same as the process for other advisors and departments.  As of August 2014, the following UWF advising centers and academic departments are the only ones using GradesFirst:

• First Year Advising Center (FYAC)
• Criminal Justice Advising Center

• • Scheduling an Advising Appointment with GradesFirst, for students

Please contact directly any advising centers not listed above.

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Tutoring Centers

Another feature of GradesFirst is to allow students to schedule and request appointments with their tutors, and to make sure that the process for scheduling and requesting appointments with a tutor from a particular UWF tutoring centers is the same as the process for tutors from other tutoring centers.  As of August 2014, the only UWF tutoring center that allows students to schedule and request appointments through GradesFirst is the Academic Center for Excellence, or the ACE Lab (formerly known as the UWF Learning Center).

• Scheduling a tutoring appointment using GradesFirst, for students
• Requesting a tutoring appointment using GradesFirst, for students
• Signing in and out of a kiosk, for students

Changes to the ACE Lab

How the ACE Lab operated before the fall 2014 semester

Students wanting to receive help from the ACE Lab did not have to schedule appointments.  They could walk-in at any time to be served.  All the students had to do was read the tutoring schedule correctly and hope that they would be helped when they arrived.  

The tutors could work with more than one student at a time if the situation permits, and the students could work with a tutor for as long as that tutor was available.

How the ACE Lab will operate during the fall 2014 semester

Students wanting to receive help from the ACE Lab will have to make an appointment through GradesFirst.  Walk-ins may be accepted, but only if a tutor is available.

Students do not have to worry about misreading the tutoring schedule because GradesFirst offers a more simplified schedule.

Unless otherwise noted, every appointment will be a one-on-one session with a tutor.

Unless otherwise noted, every appointment will last no longer than 45 minutes.

Rationale for the changes

1. Scheduling appointments will save you the frustration of being rejected at the door and will help the tutors better secure the resources you need, when you need them.
2. You would be less likely to misread the schedule posted on GradesFirst, than the one that was usually posted on the ACE Lab website.
3. Scheduling appointments will require you to schedule your time wisely and to come to the tutoring session prepared with specific questions and concerns.
4. Results from a number of studies suggest that students benefit more from individualized one-on-one tutoring sessions than from group sessions.

Other UWF Tutoring Centers

There are two other UWF tutoring centers:  the Mathematics and Statistics Tutoring Lab and the Writing Lab.  Please contact these centers directly if you would like to receive help from them.

NOTE:  Some professors may require their students to visit specific UWF tutoring centers, so check with your professor to be sure you are visiting the correct tutoring service.

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 Preparing for Your Tutoring Session