Drop vs. Error in removing enrolled courses

Jonathan Tepper · November 2022

In Academics > Scheduling > Requests and Schedules > Student Enrolments
A garbage can would appear as an option once you edit a students course as Drop. The garbage can would then remove the course completely from the student's record. - it was very efficient and easy, also safe too because it was a two step process. Now, the only way that I can find with registrar folks, is to mark a course as an Error. But now you can only mark the course as an Error (to completely remove it from the student's record) if you manually delete the attendance and mark data before hand. This is turning into a pain for admin and seems silly. Anyone in this group know a better way? I am not familiar so wanted to ask. If someone has a suggestion on how to make this better in the K-12 Idea space, please share a link too! Otherwise I will post one.

Brian LeBlanc · November 2022

@Jonathan Tepper If I'm reading you correctly, when a student drops a class, you want all traces of that class removed from the student record - is that right?

EMS won't allow you to completely wipe the slate clean if there are grades and attendance recorded for a class. It needs to keep that historical data in the database so that there's continuity of data for all enrollments.

Our rule of thumb is that we only use Error (and I wish it had a different label, but alas) when a student has never set foot inside the classroom for that enrollment. This typically only happens in two scenarios: (1) prior to the first day of school, when schedules are fluid and no one has actually attended class yet, and (2) when a new student has enrolled but doesn't show up and withdraws before attending class.

In the second scenario, you have to mark Error for each class to allow a withdrawal to Past Candidate. We find that this is important because occasionally a student will change their mind and want to reapply, but EMS won't allow a Past Student to reapply for the same year in which they withdrew - they have to be a Past Candidate for it to work.

If a student doesn't show up and was marked absent, then withdraws two or three days later, you have to do some database trickery to get Error to work. The default attendance state is “Attended Class”. To mark the enrollment as an Error, you have to mark all days as Attended Class, then go back to Student Enrollments and mark each of them as an Error.

I hope this helps you out!

David Gillespie · November 2022

Yes, @Brian LeBlanc, you are describing the new lengthy process we must go through to remove a class completely. It was not the case previously that attendance prevented an “Error”-style drop, only grades, so it's really cumbersome now.

To be clear, when someone drops a course within our drop deadline, I want it gone from their record completely. I don't want it hanging around in the system with a drop indicator, messing up reports and counts. That should be my choice - and I accomplished it before by using “Error”. Now I have to go through and track down and manually delete all the attendance items first, and then I can use it again. I'm still going to use “Error” long beyond the first few days of school, but it's become much more painful to do so.

John Ronan · November 2022

@David Gillespie,

I agree with you. It seems as if someone might have been trying to do us a favor and prevent a complete expunge of the record if the student has some sort of attendance.

I would argue that anyone who has the rights to ‘Error’ out a student's enrollment in a course should be able to do just that as before and not have to deal with these constraints.

[though, I suspect it's more work for engineering to implement this, which means it may not get done ;-( ]

Jonathan Tepper · November 2022

Thank you @Brian LeBlanc and @David Gillespie for the replies. Both your experiences confirm there is a need to have the student enrolment flexible for different organizations and that the way I use it is the same as others.

I also thought about the way it is set up was due to data continuity. But in other parts of the system, such as contract administrators; they can in a well defined two step process remove signed contacts easier than a academic manager can managing changes for enrolled courses. Therefore, I think the tool should be revisited.

When someone in the student enrolment screen drops a student's course, the enrolment screen needs to be clear too. Once a course has been dropped, the course looks like it is an unfulfilled request. It is not unfulfilled, the registrar dropped the course for the student. In my opinion, dropped courses shouldn't be listed on that screen (if it is listed, it needs to be clearly marked as a dropped course).

For now to avoid confusion, registrar is removing the courses using error. The steps required to delete everything seems overly complicated.

David Gillespie · November 2022

@Jonathan Tepper
“When someone in the student enrolment screen drops a student's course, the enrolment screen needs to be clear too." +1 on this also … no idea why it still hangs around there.

Brian LeBlanc · November 2022

@john ronan:
@David Gillespie,
I agree with you. It seems as if someone might have been trying to do us a favor and prevent a complete expunge of the record if the student has some sort of attendance.
I would argue that anyone who has the rights to ‘Error’ out a student's enrollment in a course should be able to do just that as before and not have to deal with these constraints.

John, I think you're onto something - my guess is that at some point in the past, someone had an issue where they totally wiped an enrollment, didn't mean to, and in the process caused issues in the cumulative file. I'm ambivalent about whether or not it needs a fix - I can see Blackbaud's point, but also yours as well. Perhaps this should be a setting customizable by platform managers to determine whether registrars have rights to do this or not.

Drop vs. Error in removing enrolled courses

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