This article lists the steps to create or edit Academic Terms, which primarily have to do with your Course durations.
You should set up your Academic Terms primarily based on how you would like your courses to be set up. If all your courses last the entire academic year, then you may want one Academic Term for the whole year. If you have courses that last only one semester or if you want your transcripts to break up Fall and Spring semesters, then you would want to use two Academic Terms (Fall and Spring, for example).
Grade report periods are NOT determined by Academic Terms - ClassReach uses Grading Units to determine grade report periods.
Academic Terms also has an impact to Grading - only for averaging an overall grade. For example, if you would like to see one averaged grade for the entire year then you may want only one Academic Term. If you would like a Spring average and a Fall average then you may want two Academic Terms. You will be able to break up the grades within Academic Terms by using the Grading Units.
Note: You cannot average two Academic Terms together to get a final grade in the gradebook or progress reports. However, you can use the Cumulative Grade Report to produce one report with each Academic Term grade and the average grade for those Academic Terms.
One last things on grading, Progress Reports (report cards in ClassReach) are continually updated and available to guardians and staff to be pulled at any time. As such, if you use one Academic Term for the entire year and break that up into Grading Units (four quarters or two semesters, for example), your Progress Report will have a column for each grading unit and when that next grading period starts a grade for that class will show up on the Progress Report even though its not finalized. If you would like to avoid this, breaking the year into two or more Academic Terms is a possible solution. Please contact ClassReach Support to discuss these options.
One Academic Term vs Multiple Academic Terms. A downside to multiple Academic Terms is that you need to have separate Courses or Sections for each Academic Term. It is an additional step, but using the Data Copier, you can copy all the Section information, including teachers and students, from one Academic Term to the next very quickly.
- Sign in to your Admin ClassReach Account.
- Navigate to the Settings tab at the top of your screen.
- Click Academic Terms in the School Settings window.
To Create a New Academic Term
- Click the +Academic Term at the top right of the window to add a new term.
- Fill out the relevant fields:
- Name*: This will be the title of the term in lists and on reports.
- Start Date*: This is the date in which the term will take affect. This will be used when calculating grade reports and the like.
- End Date*: This is date in which the term will end. This will be used when calculating grade reports and the like.
- Lock Date: This is the date that the term will lock so grades, conduct, and attendance markings are locked in and cannot be changed.
- Visible To: This will determine who can view this term.
- Once all relevant fields are filled out click Save.
To Edit a Current Academic Term
- Click the Academic Term you would like to edit to expand it and then click the Edit button.
- Edit all relevant fields.
- Click Save.