Attendance for Multi-Term Courses When Student Switches Sections between Terms

Geoffrey Goodfellow

It is a frequent occurrence at our school that students switch to another section of the same multi-term course at the end of the first semester. Our registrar uses this to optimize the number of students that are able to fully satisfy their course requests around other courses that may only be offered one semester or the other. One thing we have noticed is that even though we clearly enroll the student in Course A Section 1 beginning 1st Semester and Course A Section 2 beginning 2nd Semester, there seems to be a delay in the attendance rosters. The class page rosters are exactly correct…the student only shows in the roster of Course A Section 1 during the 1st semester and then drops out 2nd semester, and the student only shows in the class roster of Course A Section 2 during the 2nd semester and is not included in the roster during the 1st semester. Despite the rosters being correct in each semester, for multi-term courses, the first day of 2nd semester has all of our attendance still with the 1st semester class enrollments, and there is no (d) or (w) indicator. It's not until the second day of the 2nd semester that the attendance switches to correctly show the students in the 2nd semester rosters. This is very confusing for teachers, office staff, parents, and students. I finally created a Blackbaud Support case this year to see if I can finally solve this problem. Unfortunately, Support confirmed that this is expected behavior for multi-term course section switches to be a day delayed in showing up in attendance. I just searched Idea bank looking for anybody else who might have a problem with this and found nothing. I also searched through previous Community posts and didn't seem to find anything. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Are there other schools who have students switching sections of multi-term courses at the semester break where attendance is NOT problematic? Perhaps it is something I have setup wrong on my side. Many thanks for any help!

Scott Chrysler

@Geoffrey Goodfellow There was a posting in the community a few months ago about something very similar, but it had to do with immediate section changes. If a student's schedule is changed from Course A section 1 to Course A section 2 at 6:00 am on Monday, the attendance change does not show until the hour the schedule begins on Tuesday. When I was the Academic Dean at my previous school and made schedule changes, I am 95% sure this was not the case. Again, we see unhelpful and illogical “expected behavior” from the system. I am baffled as to why the attendance aspect of a course change is not “live” while the roster is. Perhaps @Michael Morrissette may have some insight?

Scott

Jacqueline Koca

Hello!

Without looking at the specific examples it is hard to confirm exactly what you were seeing falls into this but I have included some information below regarding a recent change. You may have already seen this if you were following the recent idea bank idea related to this.

"We have made a tweak to how the transfer process works that should be making the drop/add transfer function more as you expect.

For attendance within SIS/LMS, we are inclusive of dates. That means that if a student is listed with a drop date of 2/4, they will remain on attendance roster for 2/4 and will no longer show beginning on 2/5.

If you use the Drop function and then manually Add to another class, you will want to be sure to set your Drop date for the last date the student should appear on the original roster and your Add date as the one the student should begin showing in the new class section.

If you use the Transfer function, it previously set the Drop and Add date to the same date causing an overlap. With a change released today, the date set when transferring will be the Add date and the day previous to that will be set as the drop date.

Please note: The change mentioned above will only impact schedule changes made moving forward. For existing or new schedule changes if you are seeing the student listed for attendance on a date after the drop date, that is not expected functionality and should be reported to support. For example, if a student has a drop date of 2/1 but is still showing in attendance on 2/2, that is not expected functionality."

@Geoffrey Goodfellow in your case that may mean that the transfer date was set to be the first day of the new term. Previously that would result in what you experienced where the students were still showing in the old section on that first day. With the change we recently released, when you set the transfer date to be that first day of the new term then it will correctly set the drop date to be previous to that, ensuring the students show in the correct section on the day you expect.

Thanks so much!
Jacqueline Koca
Senior Product Manager - Student Information System

Geoffrey Goodfellow

Many thanks, @Jacqueline Koca! This sounds exactly like the issue I was having. I think the recent change you mentioned will be very helpful to my cause. Thank you so much for describing in a very detailed way how the system is designed work. That is very helpful!

Jennifer Nakanishi

@Jacqueline Koca When switching sections of the same course from Semester 1 to 2, attendance is not the only thing affected. Grade reports will always list the Semester 1 teacher, even though the other grading parameters are set to Semester 2.