Grades and credit for Historic Semester and Quarter Long Courses Are Not Being Displayed on Transcripts

Ed Gray
Ed Gray
Fifth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions
This is our first year with Blackbaud and we are having difficulty with our transcripts that Blackbaud's tech support has been slow to resolve. We manually entered the historic grades for our students as transfer grades. Grades and credits for full-year courses are properly displayed without any issues. However, grades and credits for courses that are a semester or quarter in length are not displayed. The course title and level appear, the grade column is left blank and the credits are listed as 0.00 instead of 0.25 for quarter classes and 0.50 for semester-long classes. All grades were entered as final and only final grades are displayed on the transcript and GPA's are being calculated with final grades. When we entered the historic grades as transfer courses we specified the correct equivalent courses which have the correct lengths specified in the course configurations. We operate in four quarters within two semesters. The length of a quarter course is 1, a semester course is 2, and a full year course is 4.  I'm sure that we are not the only school that offers quarter and semester-long classes, but tech support is still researching the issue. I've read every knowledgebase article on the subject, but have not been able to resolve the issue yet, however, our seniors are starting to apply for college and need current transcripts. I have been able to manually edit the PDF's by adding the grades and credits and adjusting the cumulative GPAs for each year and then the total cumulative, but that is not a sustainable workaround especially as the college application season starts ramping up.  Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Comments

  • Cecilia Kwilos
    Cecilia Kwilos
    Ninth Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge
    The only thing I can think of to suggest is to check your Grade Plan Details for those prior years. Do you have a Grade Plan Group for semester-long classes for those prior years, and do you have the Final Grade Marked "F" in QTR2 for single-semester course in that prior year Single Semester Grade plan group?
  • Jonathan Gray
    Jonathan Gray
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
    We are in the same boat with the difference being semester/yearlong rather than quarters for our divisions and credit-earning splits.  I have been unable to fix this and am resorting to making an Advanced List pulling all grades, manually creating a Transcript per student with some Python code and making it pretty in LaTeX.  Ridiculous workaround for something that should be obvious.
  • Ed Gray
    Ed Gray
    Fifth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
    We were able to eventually resolve the issue by associating the courses with any grade equivalent (standard, AP, or Honors) full year course. It did not matter if the transferred course was a quarter or a semester length course. I'm not exactly clear on the reasoning, but it worked. It was something about how Blackbaud calculates grades and that were had entered all transfer grades as Final grades and our Final grades are calculated at the end of the year after the fourth quarter. The grades were displayed and the GPAs were correctly calculated. 
  • Lucien Piekut
    Lucien Piekut
    Eighth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
    I think what you're running into here is multi-term courses & the 'specify credits per term' setting.


    There is a back-end setting on the "school" (school level) in K12 that only BB can change. It modifies WHEN to apply a credit, this means it can apply on "F" type grade at end of year, or "T" (term), and attempt to split the credits over the terms. We believed the "F" type would work on single term and multi term courses, but this is not the case.


    What we eventually found is we asked Blackbaud to disable the "F" type setting, and keep only "T" type. Then each course config now is using the "Specify Credits per Term" setting, and we now choose when the full credit is applied.


    This KB explains it in more detail: https://www.kb.blackbaud.com.au/articles/Article/24274

Categories