Issuing Grades and Credits from the Classes and Crs Attendance Pages
Load a Grade from an Existing Gradebook
Issuing Credits from Grades Pages
Overview
For many reasons, schools may choose to issue credits and/or grades to a student before the regular grade cycle process is completed during a term. State law requires that partial credit be issued to a foster student who leaves during a term and transfers to another school district. At Independent Study schools, a student may need to receive a grade and course credit immediately upon completion of the course. Other examples of schools where a process for issuing grades and partial credits before the end of the term are Alternative Ed schools, court schools, and any school that experiences high student mobility and/or early student withdrawal. For schools with high student mobility, it will be advantageous to issue a partial credit and give a grade to a withdrawing student immediately, instead of waiting for the end of the term/grading period, in order to preserve the grade and credit data in the HIS table and on the student's transcript.
Grades and/or Credits may be now issued to transcripts for an individual student on four separate pages: Classes, Course Attendance, Grades and Grades by Teacher.
In order to prevent the creation of duplicate records in HIS, a "link" between HIS and GRD records is created when a GRD record is copied to HIS. The link is the sequence value from the HIS record (HIS.SQ), which is copied into the corresponding GRD record, in one of the GRD.S1-S12 fields (corresponding to the mark recorded in the GRD.M1 - GRD.M12 field). In other words, after GRD is copied to HIS, one of the GRD.S1 - GRD.S12 fields will contain the sequence number (HIS.SQ) for the HIS record that the GRD record was copied into. For example, if GRD.M1 (Mark 1) is copied to HIS, the corresponding HIS record's sequence number (HIS.SQ) will be copied into GRD.S1.
If existing grades for the same mark are copied to HIS again, a new HIS record will not be created; instead, the process will overwrite the HIS record containing the same sequence value. This feature should allow users to copy GRD records to HIS without creating duplicate HIS records.
Please note: this process will not be able to identify a link between HIS and GRD records created prior to the addition of this new feature. Additionally, the link will no longer exist if the GRD or HIS record containing the linked sequence number has been deleted.
Several pages are used to set parameters for this process: School Options, Portal Options, and Permissions.
School Options ↑
If a school will allow issuing grades and partial credits to students on these pages, the School Option Allow Issue Credit on Classes / Course Attendance Pages option must be set to Yes.
To change the option, click the Change button. Check (for Yes) or un-check (for No) the checkbox to allow or not allow this process at a school.
Portal Options ↑
On Portal Options, the Grades tab contains several parameters that affect the submission of grades by teachers. The Grading Windows may need to be adjusted to reflect the date range when teachers will be allowed to provide grades for students. If teachers will be allowed to adjust a credit in GRD (to give partial credit instead of full credit for a course), the Allow Teachers to Change Credit in GRD option should be selected. If teachers will be allowed to adjust the absence totals in GRD, the Allow Teachers to Change Absences in GRD option should be checked.
Permissions ↑
Admin users will be allowed to issue grades and credits to any student.
On the Grades page, the Copy to Transcript button will be available if users or teachers have Insert permission to HIS. On the Classes and Crs Attendance pages, the Issue Credit button will be available if a user or teacher has Insert permission to GRD. In order to have the Copy to Transcript available inside of the Issue Credit the user or teacher will need Insert to HIS. Additionally, the button will be available for teachers only during open grading windows and only for their own students.
Issuing Grades and Credits from the Classes and Crs Attendance Pages ↑
On the Classes and Crs Attendance pages, Admin users will see an Issue Credit button for each record. Teachers will see the Issue Credit button for their students on Crs Attendance:
Note: For schools that still use MST.TN, MST.TN2 and MST.TN3, only teachers listed in MST.TN will be able to see the Issue Credit button on the Course Attendance page.
On Classes, Admin users will see the Issue Credit button for all students; teachers will see the button for their own students:
When the Issue Credit button is pressed, the Issue Credit popup will be displayed for the section's course:
The Starting Date and Ending Date are required and default to the selected section's term dates. If the term end date is later than today's date, then today's date will be used. This date range will be used to calculate the attendance fields for the issued grade/credit and will be used for the assignment date ranges if the grade is loaded from a gradebook.
The current grade reporting mark will be provided in an blue informational box. A Grade Reporting Mark can be selected from the dropdown. Admins and non-teacher users can choose from a dropdown containing all reporting marks. Teachers will see only the open grading mark. If more than one grading window is open, a dropdown will allow the teacher to choose from the open grading periods.
A grade can be entered manually or can be loaded from an existing gradebook. Skip to Issue Credit below to read about entering grades manually, which is similar to the last step of the load from gradebook process.
Load a Grade from an Existing Gradebook ↑
To load a grade from an existing gradebook, press the Load Grade from Gradebook button. The next two popup windows contain the steps to follow when loading grades from gradebooks (for more complete information on loading grades from gradebooks, see the Load From Gradebooks documentation). Choose the gradebook and associated parameters first:
A list of gradebooks associated with the selected class will be available in the dropdown. At least one gradebook must be selected. Modify the assignment date range if necessary. The selected gradebook's assignment date ranges will default to the Starting Date if the Starting Date is after the gradebook term's start date, and will default to the Ending Date if the Ending Date is before the gradebook term's end date. The % of Overall Mark fields must total to 100 for non-rubric gradebooks. Once selections have been made, press the Next button to continue to the Grade Marks popup:
The list of grade marks is from the first selected gradebook's GTG data. Any change made here will be saved to GTG. Click Next to continue to the Grade popup, which is similar to the Issue Credit popup used for entering grades manually:
At this point, the Grade step is the same as the process for entering grades manually. The Issue Credit section below provides instructions for the Grade step when loading grades from gradebook and for the Enter Grade Manually process.
Issue Credit ↑
To enter a grade manually, press the Enter Grade Manually button. The Issue Credit popup will be displayed. The popup is similar to the Grade popup used when loading grades from gradebook, and works the same.
If data in GRD exists for the selected mark, an informational message will be shown in yellow: "Existing GRD data for the selected reporting mark are displayed in parentheses ( )." In the example above, the student already has data in the M1 (Mark 1), CR (Credits), CI (Citizenship), WH (Work Habits), C1 (Comment 1), C2 (Comment 2), C3 (Comment 3), EN (Enrolled), PR (Present), EA (Excused), UA (Unexcused), SU (Suspended), AB (Absent), and TD (Tardies) fields in GRD. The existing data is provided in parentheses next to each field.
The Mark, Citizenship, Credits, Work Habits and Comments can be modified by selecting new values from the drop-downs. The valid marks in the mark drop-down list are from the GRC table. The Mark (or grade) is a required field. Citizenship, Work Habits and Comments can also be required if the portal options requiring these fields are selected. An empty mark or a mark of "NR" will not be copied to GRD.
The Credit field can be modified by non-teacher users. For teachers, this field will honor the portal option "Allow teachers to change credit in GRD." The default value for the credit is from the MST.CR value for the section.
Under Attendance, the data is calculated from the ATT table and is based on the Starting and Ending Dates. Absences and Tardies can be modified by non-teacher users. For teachers, these fields will honor the portal option "Allow teachers to change absences in GRD."
Under Copy to Transcript, a checkbox is provided to allow the applicable data to be copied to the student's transcript. The Copy Grade to Transcript option is only displayed if the user has Insert permission to HIS. Once the Copy Grade to Transcript button is checked, if an existing record exists, a warning will be displayed:
Select the appropriate Transcript Term for the HIS record. If the School Taken should be populated with the Student's Reporting Home School instead of the LOC school, check the Populate School Taken with Home School box. Press the Save button to save any modified data to GRD and to write the record to HIS. Any existing HIS record for that course and term will be overwritten if it exists. If necessary, check the student's Transcripts page to see their existing transcript records. Once a record has been copied to the student's transcript, it will be displayed on the Transcripts page:
Issuing Credits from Grades Pages ↑
On the Grades and Grades by Teacher pages, credits can be issued to students. If the credit or grade needs to be adjusted, the GRD record should be edited before copying it to the transcript. Records with empty marks or marks of "NR" will not be copied to the transcript.
On Grades, the Copy to Transcript button will allow a grade and a partial or full credit to be written to the student's transcript. The Copy to Transcript button will be provided for all records for an Admin user. A teacher will only see the button for their students.
In the example above, an Admin user has modified the GRD record to adjust the Credit for the course to 2.50 for a student who is withdrawing halfway through the term.
On Grades by Teacher, the Copy to Transcript button is also available. If the credit or grade needs to be adjusted, the record should be edited before copying it to the transcript. Records with empty marks or marks of "NR" will not be copied to HIS.
On both Grades pages, when the Copy to Transcript button is pressed, the Copy Grade to Transcript popup is displayed.
An Admin user will be able to select any Transcript Term and any Report Mark. A teacher will only be able to select Report Marks with open Grading Windows. If the School Taken should be populated with the Student's Reporting Home School instead of the LOC school, check the Populate School Taken with Home School box. A general warning is provided on the popup: "Any existing Transcript records for the course/term will be overwritten." If you are unsure about whether any transcript records already exist for the student, check the student's Transcripts page:
In the above example, no matching course/term record exists on the student's Transcripts page. After the grade is copied to the transcript, a new record will be displayed:
NOTE: The copy button evaluates the values in these GRD fields: SC, SN, PD, CN, TN, SE. If any of these are null, the copy button will not work.