I am in the market for a (hopefully free!) grade book software and would like to see some suggestions. This would be used for a math class and I am planning for many grades (15+) per semester.
In particular, if a gradebook has any features that make it stand out from other gradebooks or spreadsheet solutions, I would appreciate knowing that information.
I'm guessing this question will get closed, but there are many options (as earthling highlighted in the comment). When I taught high school, I invested in Easy Grade Pro and was happy with it. It is not free.
Lately, I've been using a home-made Excel spreadsheet, which has been pretty easy to do, although I have a fair amount of experience with Excel. As F'x said, OpenOffice has a spreadsheet and it is free, and Google Docs also provide a free spreadsheet solution. You can also find pre-made Excel spreadsheets for grading, which you can tweak for your own use.
Another option is to see if your school has a gradebook built-in to it's student-database system. This is a nice solution because you don't have to transfer grades from one system to another, and the students have easy access to grades along the way so they can explicitly track their own progress.
If the solution has to be webbased, I think Google Docs (https://drive.google.com/) makes a lot of sense. At the very least, the learning curve is very easy and being a complete spreadsheet solution it has complete flexibility.
I can even imagine that if you create quizzes based on online forms (created from google docs) you could have grades going automatically into your form in some way.
I have found good results in using Edmodo's grade book. Even if you do not wish to use the site's other features, such as on-line homework submission or on-line quizzes, you can still add grades to this from work that students submitted on paper.
Edmodo's grade book does not have a great deal of advanced grading features, however, the advantage of using this over software-based grade books is that students can log into their own accounts to check their grades as often as they like. After I began using this, I stopped getting weekly E-mails from students asking me to tell them their grade. Additionally, by providing such transparent access to grades, it gives students pressure to get their work in. If you want to compute adjustments to the grades once the grades are finished, you can export them to a CSV and analyze the figures in a spreadsheet.
