Semeseter & Quarter Classes

Mary Cummings

We are currently setup as semester academic terms. For this upcoming year we have been asked to create a few quarter only classes. Blackbaud has confirmed that I can't add a quarter class due to our setup. Has anyone else experienced this and any suggestions for work arounds?

Thanks

Scott Chrysler

@Mary Cummings - Even if you are set up with semesters, you can still have quarter-long courses, it is just not clean as the course needs to “run” for the entire semester. So, there is half of the semester that the course does not meet, but it still appears in attendance, has an open grade book, and shows as a conflict on the master schedule. Despite telling our consultant that we had quarter-long courses in the middle school, they recommended setting up that division with semesters when we moved to K-12 years ago. Dumb.

So for our quarter-long classes, we creatively name the sections - Qtr 1, Qtr 2, Qtr 3, and Qtr 4. This helps the teacher and the students know where to be when. For example, our 6th grade rotates through our different art disciplines for the year. For the Fall Semester, Visual Art 6 and Theatre 6 each have 2 sections, one named Qtr 1 and the other Qtr 2. They are all scheduled to meet at the same time. The students enrolled in Visual Art 6 - Qtr 1 are also enrolled in Theatre 6 - Qtr 2. The students in Theatre 6 - Qtr 1 are also enrolled in Visual Arts 6 - Qtr 2. When the quarter changes, they go to the other class.

I should also mention, our grade plans are set up so that each semester is composed of 2 quarters. Being sure those are set up so the quarter-long courses' final grade appears in both the quarter grade column and the final grade column on report cards was loads of fun. It is doable, but just an amount of unnecessary time spent to “work around” the archaic limitations of the new report card builder. There is also the additional time needed to manually schedule students in “conflicting” classes.

Hope that helps.

Scott

Jennifer Miller

@Mary Cummings

Last year (our first year with BB), we had year-long, semester, quarter and trimester courses. It was a mess. This year, I converted everything to quarters, and kept the trimesters. (eg Year-long courses now have a length of 4 (4 quarters). I'm optimistic this will be much cleaner for us.