Assessment Skills - Categorization in the works?

Hi! I reached out to a few people who I hope have a workaround, but wanted to reach out to the community at large to see what you think, or if you have a solution!


IF you are the individual responsible for creating Grade Plans, this is a question for you! - If you are interested anyway, this is also for you.

Question and Issue:

I was wondering if you had started making Grade Plans in Academics. If so, you might have noticed that when using Assessment Skills, you will select from a dropdown list.

This list is something you create under Assessment Skills and you enter in every single skill for every grade and class in this area. Currently, there is no way to group them so you will potentially have many skills that are very similar all grouped together in no particular order. When creating your Grade Plans and entering in the associated Assessment Skills finding the exact wording of the one created for this year/ grade is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Especially when some Assessment skills are almost exactly the same but is slightly different for each grade.


For our school, these are all ACTIVE so making any inactive is not an option. We considered putting a symbol or number in front of each skill to make it easier to find, but we don't want that symbol or number to also be on the Report Card/Transcript (i.e 3. Respect: Student shows respect for others. 3. Curious: Student is able to ask questions when they need help 3.Responsive: Student follows multi-step directions with little to no additional direction).

I have submitted an Idea to Blackbaud to consider allowing the option to categorize our Assessment skills so that we can group them by Grade or Subject. That way when creating our Grade Plans, we can first select (for example) Assessment Skill Category: 3rd Grade and then the subsequent dropdown will only show Assessment Skills specific to 3rd grade.

Ideas that are voted on/ have positive support have a chance of hopefully coming to fruition. If you are interested in this option, please take a look at my proposal linked below. If you agree, please consider voting as I believe this will benefit most PK-12th grade schools. I hope it is ok to link the idea here, ideally I would love to find a workaround, but this would be a viable solution that would benefit a range of schools.


https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/K12OR-I-2492


Let me know what you think!