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SIS 2000+ Mark Reporting

Step 12, Credit Calculation & Posting

This application is used to calculate the amount of credit attempted and awarded for a selected Mark Reporting Period. These calculations should be done before calculating the Honor Roll, printing Report Cards, or Posting to History (transcripts), etc. To successfully run this process, several pieces of the Mark Reporting set-up need to be verified, and likely modified, before attempting to calculate credits for the first time.

This is a new SIS 2000+ application that was added to the Mark Reporting module with the version 47a release on April 15, 1999. The new procedure contained therein eliminates the need to run SQL scripts at each Marking Period to populate the Credits Attempted and Awarded fields. As a result, some changes have been made in the other Mark Reporting documents that were dated prior to April 15, 1999.

Prerequisites -

• Appropriate Mark Items must be designated as Awarding Credit:

This is done through the Mark Definitions application. See Mark Reporting, Step 3, Create Mark Definitions. Any Mark Item that you will be performing a GPA or Credit calculation on will need to have the Credit flag checked. (Only one Mark Item may be selected per Mark Reporting Term, per Mark Definition.) Remember to make this setting for appropriate Mark Items in ALL of your Mark Definitions.

• Credits must be properly defined for Courses:

In the District Courses application, under the Credits/Codes Tab, the values for Grad Credits and GPA Credits fields must be filled in properly. The values that should be entered here are the FULL credit values for successful completion of the course. See District Courses.

For example, if this is a year-long course, and your school awards 1 credit at the end of the year for the course, the value entered in District Courses must be 1. When the Credits are calculated for this course in a Semester school, 0.5 credits will be awarded at the end of each semester, when credits are calculated. If Honor Rolls and current term GPA’s are calculated at this school quarterly, then 0.25 credits will be awarded at each quarter in order for the calculations to be performed. ONLY THE CREDITS THAT ARE ATTACHED TO MARK ITEMS THAT WILL BE POSTED WILL SHOW UP IN ACADEMIC HISTORY AND BECOME PART OF THE STUDENTS’ PERMANENT RECORD. Other credits will only be used for calculation purposes and will in effect be discarded at the end of the school year.


Note on Report Cards:
The Report Card currently displays a summary total of credits up to the current point in the Mark Reporting Timeline. Because this is a summary of ALL the Mark Items, the credits displayed may look inflated as of now because they will be a summary of the quarter AND semester credits that were calculated. This will be addressed at some time in the future.

• Terms and Term Codes will need to be properly defined for the calculations to be accurate:

A change has been made to the set up of terms for tracks, based on the need to calculate credits attempted and awarded. The biggest change in logic for this set up is that the number of terms per year defined for a track will now have to take Mark Reporting Terms into consideration. Previously, users were trained that scheduling terms did not have to relate to Mark Reporting Terms. This is no longer true.

Tracks are defined in the Track Editor program (See Mark Reporting, Step 1, Set Up Tables). The value in the Terms Per Year field ('General' tab) for tracks will need to be changed to the number of terms for which you will be calculating any Credit Values or current term GPA’s. For example, if you currently have a track defined as 2 Terms Per Year, but you calculate a current term GPA on a quarterly basis, your Terms Per Year will need to be changed to 4. This change will have to be made to both CURRENT YEAR and FUTURE YEAR tracks that exist on your databases.

This change in Terms Per Year means that you will have to add more Term End and Term Begin markers to your Track Calendar. Go to the 'Events' tab of the 'Calendar' tab of the Track Editor and add the Term Markers to the Calendar where they would correspond to your Mark Reporting Terms. After adding the Markers, click the Validate Events command button to ensure that you added the proper number of Term Markers. Also, click on the Recalc Calendar command button to ensure that the changes to the Terms per Year and the Term Markers have been reflected properly in your Track Calendar.

The above changes mean that you will now need to modify the Term Codes table for your scheduling terms. In many installations, semester schools were set up with scheduling terms based on Tracks having 2 terms per year, while the Mark Reporting terms were set-up on a 4 term (or quarterly) basis. The scheduling terms will need to be changed to correlate to the Mark Reporting terms. This is accomplished via the Table Editor application as mentioned above. Now the Term Codes table must also be modified as follows:

In a previous semester set-up, with semester-long terms defined for a track having 4 quarters defined for Mark Reporting, the following changes will likely need to be made (after the Terms Per Year has been adjusted from 2 to 4 in the Track Editor):


Change Semester 1 (which is currently likely to have the values of (Trmstart)Start = 1, (Trmdur)Duration = 1, (Trmend)End = 2) to:
Start = 1 (refers to Quarter 1)
Duration = 2 (duration of 2 quarters)
End = 3 (a calculated field sums Start+Duration values; cannot be changed by the user)
Change Semester 2 (which is currently likely to have the values of Start = 2, Duration = 1, End = 3) to:
Start = 3 (refers to Quarter 3)
Duration = 2 (duration of 2 quarters)
End = 5 (a calculated field sums Start+Duration values; cannot be changed by the user)
Change All Year (which is currently likely to have the values of Start = 1, Duration = 2, End = 3) to:
Start = 1 (refers to Quarter 1)
Duration = 4 (duration of 4 quarters)
End = 5 (a calculated field sums Start+Duration values; cannot be changed by the user)

Basically, ensure that your scheduling terms now relate in a logical way to your Mark Reporting Terms and that they correspond to the number of Terms Per Year your track has been modified to now contain. The Term Codes and Terms Per Year settings are critical to the successful calculation of Credits Awarded and Attempted.

12.1 Open Credit Calculation & Posting application
From SIS 2000+'s Mark reporting Menu, click on the Credit Calc & Post icon button.

Fig. 115 - default parameters

12.2 Define parameters

Fig. 116 - sample parameters

• Track -

Select attendance track to calculate
• Term -

Select the Mark Reporting Term to calculate credits for. Only Marking Terms that contain Mark Items with Credit Awarded designated will appear as choices in the drop-down list
• Enrollment date range -

Use the enrollment date range feature to filter which students to calculated credits for. The dates used will likely be the same as the dates you used to view students in Class Marks or print Mark Reporting Scan Forms for the target Mark Reporting Term. This date range will filter out students who have enrolled late or have not remained enrolled for a minimum duration, so that Credits are not calculated for them. Use the drop down calendars activated by the field buttons to define a date range as follows:
• Include students enrolled before -

This field defaults to today's date. Set the date to the latest date of enrollment to be included in the credit calculations. This is a cutoff date that will exclude those students who enrolled in a class too late.
• Include students withdrawn after -

This field defaults to today's date. Set the date to maximum date that student must remain enrolled in a class to be included in the credit calculations. This is the cutoff date that will exclude those students who dropped a class too early.

Click on the Select command button. A list of data fields is displayed (Fig. 117). These are the data fields that will available for querying. The default criteria is "All" for each data field. To apply a select query to any data field, continue with Step 12.3.1. If no queries are needed, continue to the posting procedure in Step 12.4.

Fig. 117

12.3.1 Select data fields and apply queries
Select (highlight) a data field in the list until it is highlighted in gray (Fig. 117) and then click on the Edit command button. A criteria selection screen will open that is specifically designed for the selected data field. The sample in Fig. 118 shows the criteria selection screen for the Course data field with 'Acctng 1, 4550' selected for reporting and 'Acctng1i, 4560' ready to be selected.

Fig. 118 - sample, Query Type 3

There are several possible types of queries, depending on the data field selected. Further instructions on how to select and apply each type of query are found in the document titled General Reporting Procedures.

Class = Query Type 1. A specific course section or a set of course sections may be selected for calculation. If none are selected, then "All" will be calculated.

Course = Query Type 3. A specific course or set of courses may be selected for calculations (Fig. 118). If none are selected then "All" will be calculated.

Group = Query Type 1. A specific course group or set of course groups may be selected for calculations. If none are selected, then "All" will be calculated. Course groups are pre-defined in the Group Editor program.

Faculty = Query Type 3. Students for a specific faculty member or set of faculty members may be selected for calculations. If none are selected, then "All" will be calculated.

Faculty Group = Query Type 1. A specific faculty group or set of faculty groups may be selected for calculations. If none are selected, then "All" will be calculated. Faculty groups are pre-defined in the Group Editor program.

Apply queries as needed for each of the above data fields.

Note on Query results: Use caution when making multiple queries across data fields. Only records that satisfy all queries will be calculated. Some queries may be mutually exclusive, causing the post to yield no calculations.

12.3.2 Review selected parameters
After parameters are set and queries applied as needed, the view will return to the 'Select' screen. Each data field in the list will display a code after its name signifying the parameters currently applied (Fig. 119). In the example below, only students in courses '44550' and '4560' taught by faculty in the 'Teach108' faculty group will be calculated for credits. Review the parameters. If all are satisfactory, click on the Done command to close the review screen and continue to the posting procedure in Step 12.4. If editing is required, repeat Step 12.3.1.

Fig. 119 - sample review

To restore a field's parameters to the default selection, highlight the field name in the 'Select' screen and click on the Reset command button.

Fig. 120

At the end of the calculations a 'Credit Posting' statistics message will be displayed showing the results of the calculations (Fig. 121). Click on "OK" to close the message. Calculations are now complete.

Fig. 121

12.5 Viewing, Editing & Recalculating
The results of credit calculations for a student/course section (class)/term may be viewed through the Class Marks or Student Marks applications by right clicking on a "grade bucket". This action open a details screen for the target mark (Fig. 122). The credit values may be edited in this screen. See Mark Reporting, Step 9, Class Marks Editor and Student Marks Editor for more details.

Fig. 122

If any changes are made to a student's marks that may affect their Credits Attempted or Awarded values, you will want to recalculate the credits by running the Credit Calculation & Posting application again for the applicable enrolled course sections. Make the same selections you did before, but use the Select feature to choose only the course sections that need to be recalculated. This application calculates by course section rather than by student to greatly improve performance when it is run in bulk.