Academics Frequently Asked Questions

Academics is a large part of Blackbaud's Education management suite of products, made up of both student information and learning management features. Naturally, there are a lot of features for each and here are some frequently asked questions regarding them.

Student Requests

While there are a number of reasons why this would occur, the biggest one is typically related to the courses themselves not being scheduled.

However, there are some other areas to check as well including conflicts with another course, student enrollment issues, or something being wrong with the course setup or student setup.

While there's currently no way to do this, there are a couple workarounds.

  • Wait to offer the course(s) until after course requests are done.

  • If you have already offered the courses, you can temporarily inactivate the course(s) until course requests are complete. You can also make an entire department inactive if you want to exclude all courses in the department from course requests. When course requests are complete, reactivate the department(s) or course(s).

  1. First, go to Scheduling, Course selection and schedules, then select Departments & Courses.

  2. From here, edit the department.

  3. Check Inactive.

  4. Once finished, select Save & Close.

  1. First, go to Scheduling, Course selection and schedules, then select Departments & Courses.

  2. Expand the department the course is in and then edit it.

  3. Set the status to Inactive.

  4. When finished, select Save & Close.

First, head to Scheduling, Course selection and schedules, then Overview. Under Course Requests, select Approve Requests.

Set the search status as either Awaiting Approval or Awaiting Enrollment then select Approve. Finally, deselect the denied Course Request and select the courses that are Approved if applicable.

Yes, they can!

A user with the online signup manager role can open up the ability for teachers to recommend courses in Course Requests by taking the following steps:

1. Go to Academics

2. Next, select Scheduling, then Course selection and schedules, followed by Course request setup.

4. In the Recommended column, click the pencil icon to edit the field and select the Teacher Role.

Once Course Recommendation is opened up for the teacher role, a user with this role sees the Course Recommendations option on the Class page. When the Teacher selects Course Recommendations, the teacher can then type in New Recommendations.

If you're seeing this, the biggest thing to verify is whether or not the student as met the minimum number of requests.

For example if your school has set the minimum course requests required to 7, and the student only has 6 course requests, they display as Awaiting Requests. Once a 7th is made, the student will then move to the Awaiting Approval status which is the Default Filter for the Course Request list.

Yes. Under Academics, head to Scheduling, Course selection and schedules, then Overview. From Course Requests, select More Actions and then Delete Requests.

Select the type of request you want to remove, the course, Year, and School, then select Next to see a list of matching results. Use the check boxes next to the individual requests to delete in bulk. A warning message appears prior to any course request getting removed to prevent accidental deletions.

Report Card and Transcript Builder

Under Report Card SetupWhen you edit a report card template, go to the design form step where you can add columns to the Courses/Groups grid option. From here, there are two separate column options for teachers: All teacher(s) and Head teacher. So if you want multiple or all teachers to appear on the report card, you'll need to add an All teacher(s) column to the report card.

If a comment on a report card isn't following the format as given, then the comment likely has some HTML within it. The report card builders do not support HTML as it can cause issues when the report card is rendered. If you edit a report card comment and select the HTML button, there may be a number of SPAN or DIV tags, which would indicate that the comment was pasted in from a word processor. You'll want to remove this comment and paste it in as plain text to resolve the issue. From there, you can format the comment(s) as needed.

For the new builder, under Getting started, you can change this option from Layout.

Not all elements have this option. However, if you use a Text Area, this is possible. It comes with a WYSIWYG editor with font size, font family, text color, bold, italics, and more.

For each report card, you can set access dates for specific roles for each grade column. What may have happened is someone could have a teacher role and a parent role and they're seeing the grade because one of those roles has access even if the other does not. Access can be set through Edit current year's access, Edit next year's access, or you can select Edit access to edit access for any year.

As expected, there’s no simple answer to this question. There are numerous places to check inside of the Education management products that could cause things to not display on a Report Card or Transcript.

Here are a few places to investigate:

If a student is awarded a grade between the minimum value for one grade and the maximum value of the other, the grade won't display. This will usually happen when teachers are using decimals.

The sort order of the grade plan header titles for the grading term may not match, these must match from one term to another. To correct this, head to Grading setup and then School year setup.

  1. Fill out the filter options including School year, Group Type, School level, and Grade Plan Options.

  2. Select View when you're ready.

  3. Then, select View next to the grade plan name, under the grading term.

  4. Select Edit on the upper right of the grade plan

  5. Check to make sure the sort order is accurate

  6. Check the next grading term and make sure each of the sort orders match the first grading term.

  1. The grades may have not been added to the report card in the builder.

    1. Use the filters to select the School Year, Level and Style that the report card lives under then select View.

    2. Select Edit for the report card you want to modify. Under Report Card Details, select Access/Grades.

    3. Select Edit Access/Grades. If needed, select Add Column for the appropriate term.

    4. Find the correct Grade Plan Group and use the drop down to select the grade you would like to display.

    5. Once finished, Save.

      Note: This only works for standard Report Cards

  2. The report cards are being generated with a view that does not have access to them.

    1. If the Viewed By filter is set to Faculty, and inside the report card builder, faculty do not yet have access to those grades (see the steps in answer B for how to view access dates), you will not see grades when the report card is generated.

    2. Use the filters to select the School Year, Grade Level, and Last Name range.

    3. Change the Viewed By filter to None.

    4. Select a Report Card name to generate the Report Card.

  3. The grades may not fall within the Grading Translation Scores.

    1. For example, you have a student with a score of 103, your grade translation only goes up to 100. Or you have the Grade Translation set as A=98-100 and B=90-96, this would mean a user with a grade of 97 will not display the grade on the report card until you edit the grade translation.

    2. From Grade Translations, find the grade translation you need to make a edit to, and select Edit.

    3. Change the Min and Max scores to reflect the correct numbers, or add another Grade Translation by selecting Add Grade Value at the bottom.

For each report card, you can set access dates for specific roles for each grade column. What can happen is someone could have a teacher role and a parent role and they're seeing the grade because one of those roles has access even if the other does not.

Access can be set through Edit current year's access, Edit next year's access, or you can select Edit access to edit access for any year. There's something fishy happening with current year and next year on SIS, so take a look under Edit access to see the settings for this.

Grading

Weighted Grade Point Averages can be set up in Grading setup via the Grade translations tab.

If your school offers courses that require different grading scales (such as Honors or Advanced Placement), then you only need one Grade Translation table if the GPA Equivalent trend is consistent between grades.

If your school weights certain classes when calculating the GPA, the weight can either be applied at the course level if it's consistent across the board (e.g., AP classes get a GPA bump of 1 point and Honors classes get a bump of .5 points) or at the translation level if it is not consistent (e.g., AP classes get a bump of 1.0 as long as a student earns a C or above). In the latter scenario, create a Grade Translation for each scaling difference.

For more information, see the help topic Create a Grade Translation or the Guide to Grading Setup.