How We Grade
Every curriculum on this site carries a letter grade — A through F, plus nine individual dimension scores. This page explains exactly how those grades are built, so you can decide how much weight to give them.
The nine dimensions
We score every curriculum on nine separate qualities, each on a 1-to-5 scale:
- Academic Rigor — how demanding the content is relative to grade-level expectations.
- Ease of Use — how much setup, planning, or teaching background a parent needs before running it.
- Parent Time Required — daily and weekly hands-on involvement needed to run the program.
- Cost Value — what you get relative to the price, not the raw price itself.
- Engagement — how likely a typical student is to stay interested without a fight.
- Flexibility — how easily the program adapts to schedule changes, pace, or multi-age households.
- Independent Learning — how much a student can work through it without a teacher present.
- Support & Community — the depth of official support and active user community around it.
- Special-Needs / Learning-Differences Support — how well it accommodates learners with ADHD, dyslexia, or other processing differences.
Each dimension has five written anchor descriptions (what a 1 looks like, what a 5 looks like, and the range between) so scoring stays consistent from curriculum to curriculum rather than drifting toward vibes. You can read the full anchor language for every dimension and score in our internal rubric — the same document our reviewers score against.
From nine scores to one letter grade
Each dimension score (1–5) is multiplied by a default weight, summed into a single weighted average, then converted to a 0–100 scale and mapped to a letter:
| Score (0–100) | Letter |
|---|---|
| 93–100 | A |
| 85–92 | A- |
| 77–84 | B+ |
| 69–76 | B |
| 61–68 | B- |
| 53–60 | C+ |
| 45–52 | C |
| 37–44 | C- |
| 25–36 | D |
| 0–24 | F |
The badge shown on curriculum cards collapses this to a single letter (A/B/C/D/F) for quick scanning; the full grade with its +/- modifier is visible in each curriculum’s dimension breakdown.
Default weights — and why they aren’t equal
We don’t treat all nine dimensions as equally important, because they aren’t equally predictive of whether a curriculum actually works for a family. Academic Rigor and Ease of Use carry the most weight (16% and 14%) because they’re the strongest drivers of long-term outcomes and of whether a program actually gets used consistently — a rigorous curriculum that never gets opened delivers zero real-world value. Engagement sits in a second tier (12%) because it drives completion and retention. Parent Time Required, Cost Value, Flexibility, Independent Learning, and Special-Needs Support each sit around 10%: real factors, but ones that vary more by family preference than by objective curriculum quality. Support & Community carries the least weight (8%) since it’s genuinely helpful but supplementary to the curriculum’s own content.
Badges
A handful of curricula also carry a badge — computed automatically from the same grading data, not hand-picked:
- Editor’s Pick — the 5 highest overall-scoring curricula on the site.
- Best Value — the 5 curricula that deliver the most grading-score per dollar, rewarding free and budget-friendly programs that still score well rather than just the cheapest option.
- Most Rigorous — the 5 curricula with the highest Academic Rigor scores.
Because these are recomputed from the underlying scores, the qualifying list shifts automatically whenever a curriculum’s grade changes — there’s no separate “badge committee” decision to keep in sync.
Make it yours: the priorities quiz
The default weights reflect our judgment about what matters most on average — but “on average” isn’t your family. If cost matters far more to you than academic rigor, or if special-needs support is non-negotiable, our priorities quiz lets you set your own weight on each dimension and re-ranks every curriculum in the directory using your numbers instead of ours.
Evidence and review dates
Every curriculum review identifies its last editorial review date, links to the publisher material used as its primary factual source, and links back here for the scoring method. Publisher information can change, especially price, product format, and support details, so use the linked official source to confirm a purchase decision. We will correct factual errors and refresh a review when its underlying product changes; editorial judgments remain clearly labeled as judgment.
This is our editorial assessment, not an objective fact
Every score and every grade on this site reflects our own evaluation, built from publicly available curriculum content, publisher materials, and patterns we’ve observed across parent and reviewer feedback. It is not a claim of objective, provable fact, and it is not an endorsement or condemnation of any publisher. Two reasonable reviewers could score the same curriculum slightly differently — that’s the nature of an editorial judgment, not a bug in our process. Justification notes on each dimension score are written as our assessment (“we found,” “in our experience with families using this program”) rather than as absolute claims. If you believe a specific score is factually wrong — not just a matter of opinion — contact us and we’ll take a look.