The report card system is designed to report on student progress using up to 20 objectives per subject and an unlimited number of subjects. As such, it is suitable for use in both elementary and secondary grade levels. The report card system can print these subject results (along with unlimited size comments) in any desired order in a high quality PDF. It includes a tabular design, with subject shading and table lines. Since the source to the report card layout is available, report cards can easily be customized for individual school needs. The report card script has been rewritten several times and will continue to improve and evolve.
The use of the word subject is roughly equivalent to the word course. When you define a subject and a section you are really defining a course in a particular subject area taught to a particular group of students. We will use the word subject in this context.
The main steps in getting started with the report card system are:
After that, the teachers will enter student evaluations for each class (subject-section). Report cards are then printed after that.
Once the subjects are setup for your school, there should not be a lot of work maintaining them. In a particular year, the teacher for a subject may change or a particular object, etc. Otherwise, subjects only require adding, once.
However, student enrollment in subjects is done at least once a year, and likely twice or more often if semestered. As well, there will be subject drops and enrollments on an ongoing basis as well.
At the end of the school year (after all report cards and other reports have been run), all subject enrollments should be erased by your system administrator, before you begin a new year of school. The subject enrollment records store all the students' evaluations for the year. These should also be posted into the transcript system (and other reports run), before being deleted.
Once a student is enrolled in a subject, they will also appear in the gradebook in that subject for the teacher of this course.
In this program, a Term or reporting period is a period of time with exams or tests of some kind at the end. A report card / progress report is generated for parents.
Most scripts can figure out the current term by using the current date and values stored in the configuration file.
There is also a term setting button on the report card page. It has a different purpose. This is used to lock mark entry by teachers into a particular term. It can also turn off mark entry by teachers (and also posting from the gradebook) if set to 0.
In a multi-track school where different grade levels have different numbers of terms (with different start and end dates), the terms for different tracks may be set separately. This is a configuration setting controlled by your system administrator. This will be an issue if you have a grade K-12 school with 3 terms K-9, and 4 terms 10-12. Setting these separately allows report cards (and mark entry) to be done separately for these 2 groups (Elementary and High School). This will ensure that teachers put their evaluations (marks and comments) in the correct term.
The subject is entered using the button called Add a Subject on the report card page.
If the subject you are entering is similar to an existing one, you can clone it using the clone button after entering the subject-section (subjsec) of the existing one. This might be an advantage if there is a large amount of text in objectives, etc. Of course your new subject (or course), must have a different subject code and/or section code. Typically we use a one (1) for a section code and a 4 digit number for a subject code. Some schools include teacher initials in the section code '1LR' to give it some mnemonic value if there are several sections of the same subject. The subject code for schools in Saskatchewan (Canada) have to use the Saskatchewan Learning subject codes in order to use the online xml transfer system for synchronizing data with the provincial SDS (student data system). Other jurisdictions may have similar requirements for the subject codes. I have also provided a link to online codes that may be used if desired. This is on the top of the subject entry page and is called Other Codes.
You enter values as outlined below.
The system automatically joins the course code and section code together with a hyphen to create a unique subject-section code to uniquely describe a particular class. As a result, course codes and section codes should not themselves contain hyphens.
For example in a semestered system with a midterm and a final exam period, there would be two reporting periods. If this was the first semester we would have:
Starting Term | 1 |
Ending Term | 2 |
If in the second semester, we would have:
Starting Term | 3 |
Ending Term | 4 |
If there was a full year course with 4 reporting periods:
Starting Term | 1 |
Ending Term | 4 |
In a Quad system with 4 Quads and 8 terms (2 report cards per quad), the second quad subjects would have:
Starting Term | 3 |
Ending Term | 4 |
The subject table also has other fields that cannot be seen from this form that are used to control scheduling of this subject. These are accessible from the schedule page.
Subjects can also be edited, deleted, and cloned using the Edit/Delete Subjects button. Deleting subjects can only be done if there are no students registered in that class.
The View Subjects button allows a view of all subjects in the school. It can be viewed in several different orders.
The Subject Aliases are deprecated. They are small numbers that uniquely identify a subject-section and are used only for doing particular types of subject based attendance. They are not used by the report card system at all. This section, below the subject management area, allows the management of subject aliases (if required in your school).
Students must be enrolled in particular sections of particular subjects before report card marks can be entered, subject based attendance done, or the gradebook used.
There are several ways that students may be enrolled depending on your school situation:
The Chk selection box is used to set whether all students are initially checked or unchecked in checkboxes. Use whatever state (checked or unchecked) is faster to select subjects and students for enrollment. (ie. Use chk and then uncheck the ones you don't want or vice versa)
If you have several sections of the same subject, it might make sense to give section names that are somewhat mnemonic. (6FS for Grade 6 Fred Smith).
Both of these methods check that enrollment/evaluation records don't already exist. It will skip over existing records. If you put a wrong term into a subject (term 1 to 3 instead of 1 to 4), you can simply re-enroll that subject, and it will add in the term 4 records while skipping the term 1, 2, and 3 records. This is not a recommended approach, but it does work.
Note: When a student is enrolled in a particular section of a particular subject (course), multiple records are added to the eval(uation) table. There is one record for each reporting period of that subject. If there are 4 terms (quarters, reporting periods) in that subject then 4 records will be entered... one for term 1, term 2, etc. These are, of course, required to record the marks/evaluation for each of those terms.
Students drop courses. Students change courses. This will allow you to make those necessary adjustments.
Click on Edit/Delete Student Subject Records, and choose the subject-section that you would like to change. These are sorted by grade and then subject. There are two options:
Notice that these records are the records used by teachers to record their evaluations of students.
Delete Individual Student Enrollments is used to search for the enrollments for a single student. Like the student search function on the main page, you may search by Lastname, Lastname and Firstname, or Initials (my favourite). You can then make the required changes to enrollment. Do not remove subject enrollments until you are certain the student is not returning, etc. These records contain all of the student's evaluations and would have to be re-entered if she/he returned, in order to print their report card.
There are a couple of reports used to view various aspects of subject enrollment:
The report card is normally generated on a per grade or per class basis to keep the size of the files generated to a reasonable size. This PDF file can be saved for reprinting later in the event of problems in printing (although it can also be easily regenerated). As well, individual report cards can be printed from this single file by being selective in the printing dialogue box of the Adobe Acrobat Reader client. (You can also find the record of interest by doing a search for his/her name in the PDF. Click the binocular icon.)
The starting screen for this script includes the following options:
The reason for this is so that printers and digital photocopiers that have duplexing can then correctly generate the report cards on both sides of the paper, saving a lot of paper. The other advantage is the most digital photocopiers can also staple the report cards at the same time. This saves secretaries a lot of stapling time. They can simply be taken out of the photocopier and distributed.
Other reports in this section include:
This is an alternate report card system with predefined choices for all objectives. This makes it quite simple for teachers to quickly enter assessments for their students without large amounts of writing (since the objectives and choices themselves are quite long). The other goal was to have a less formal appearing report card for parents, while still maintaining good reporting practices to parents, including attendance, etc.
All of the scripts for this system are accessed from the report card page. Most of the scripts are on the bottom left of this page, in blue. The process of setting up this system consists of:
You first select the type of group: homeroom, grade, or alt grouping, and then put in the value for that group in the next field. Separate multiple groups with spaces (ie. both grade 2 and 3 would be '2 3'). You then select the subjects for this student group either based on their group value (which you put in as one of the fields of the subject) or else just select 'All' to show all subjects in this system (not the main report card system). The students and subject check boxes will mean that the next screen will have them all selected (to speed up the selection process). You could first select all and then simply uncheck a few on the next screen if this is faster than just selecting some students and subjects on the next screen.
The next screen will show the students matched with each subject in turn. Uncheck (deselect) those who are not taking a particular class. Once this is done and submitted, your enrollments are done.
There are several options for controlling report cards, now stored in a separate configuration file called repcard.conf. These settings may be viewed by using the View Configuration Files button on the EOY page. All new settings will be placed at the top of the file to make it easier to update.
It is shown below:
# New for 3.50 release #-------------------------- $r_Divlogofile = 'divlogo.jpg'; $r_Divlogowidth = '18mm'; $r_Showlogo = 1; # Show School Logo rather than school name. $r_Logofile = 'schoollogo.jpg'; $r_Logowidth = '42mm'; # Printing width of the school logo. $r_Schooladdresswidth = '70mm'; $r_AddressSpacer = '5mm'; # adds space below the address to align logo. # Pre-kindergarten report cards (or Alternate system) $r_Altlogofile = 'bus.jpg'; $r_Altlogowidth = '96mm'; # width of bus logo. $r_Altdivlogowidth = '20mm'; # smaller div logo. $r_Altaddresswidth = '70mm'; # width of division name $r_Altspacer = '10mm'; # pushes up division name # show provincial education number (or state #) $r_Showprovnum = 1; # Show administrators in the page header; names must be set. $r_Showadmins = 0; $r_Principal = 'Principal'; $r_Viceprincipal = 'Vice-principal'; $r_ShowMonthlyAttendance = 1; # 3 Lates = 1 Absent; for calc subject absences. $r_LateAbsentRatio = 3; # default periods per day for teacher mode report cards. $r_defaultppd = 4; # Personal Development Section # Subject that these evaluation keys apply to. $r_personal_growth = 'Personal and Social Development'; # PD (Personal Development) Evaluation Keys $r_pdevalgrp{PK}='c'; $r_pdevalgrp{K}='c'; $r_pdevalgrp{1}='a'; $r_pdevalgrp{2}='a'; $r_pdevalgrp{3}='a'; $r_pdevalgrp{4}='a'; $r_pdevalgrp{5}='a'; $r_pdevalgrp{6}='b'; $r_pdevalgrp{7}='b'; $r_pdevalgrp{8}='b'; $r_pdeval{a}[0]='I - Independent - Student is able to demonstrate appropriate social and personal behaviours independently and consistently'; $r_pdeval{a}[1]='M - Meeting Success - Student demonstrates appropriate personal and social behaviours in the school environment.'; $r_pdeval{a}[2]='P - Progressing with Support - Student is progressing towards an awareness of appropriate personal and social behaviours in the school environment. He/She often requires guidance.'; $r_pdeval{a}[3]='D - Experiencing Difficulty - Extensive guidance is required for student to display appropriate personal and social behaviours in a school environment.'; $r_pdeval{b}[0] = 'O - Outstanding'; $r_pdeval{b}[1] = 'G - Good'; $r_pdeval{b}[2] = 'A - Acceptable'; $r_pdeval{b}[3] = 'NI - Needs Improvement'; # New for 3.25 release #-------------------------- # All values here are replaced in 3.50 # New for 2.50 release #-------------------------- # Calculate GPA ( 0 = no, 1 = yes ) $r_calcgpa = 1; # Values for Paper Size: letterpaper, a4paper, legalpaper removed # since new 'defaultpapersize' defined in admin.conf for ALL pdf # reporting. NOT USED $r_papersize = 'letterpaper'; # Change to match your paper size setting (in admin.conf) # Letter Paper: 279mm x 216mm; shorter and fatter than a4. # A4 Paper: 297mm x 210mm $r_textwidth = '184mm'; # 32mm hor margin total - letter size $r_textheight = '244mm'; # 35mm vert margin total - letter size $r_fontsize = '10pt'; # 10pt, 11pt, or 12pt only $r_voffset = '-15mm'; $r_hoffset = '-8mm'; $r_grayscale = '0.90'; $r_NewPageBeforeAttendance = 1; # (0 = No, 1 = Yes) $r_ShowAdditionalComments = 1; # (0 = No, 1 = Yes) # room for parent signature at bottom of report card; $r_PrintParentSig = 1; # normally below a tear off line. # last term printout with special graduation box. $r_PrintYearEnd = 1; # 2.40 and earlier ------------------------------------------ $subjspace = '8'; # cm width of subject field in tables. Used in calcs so no unit. $markspace = '1.5'; # centimeter width of mark field in tables. # Assessment Key printout widths $assesskeycols = 3; # keys are 3 columns wide... $assesskeywidth = '5.5in'; # 5.5in is used for assessment keys # Show a 'final' column and calculate average from term values # (ie. NO summative evaluation.) # Calculate Final Average from term values.(0=no, 1=yes) $calcfinal = 0; $clasavg = 0; # Show Class Average (0=no, 1=yes) # Show homeroom teachers on report card.(0=no, 1=yes) $showHomeroomTeacher = 1; # Show tearoff line for parent signature return (0=no, 1=yes) $showTearoff = 1; # Show grading scheme on the report card. (0=no,1=yes) $showGradeScheme = 1; # No Longer used in 3.50 and later; remove with version 4.00+ release. #$showLogo = 0; # Show School Logo rather than school name. #$logoLocation = '../../etc/schoollogo.jpg'; #left in etc folder... #$logoWidth = '2.5in'; # Printing width of the school logo. $finalterm = 3; # The last term to print assessment values. # Descriptive Text for each term. Note: no zeroth term. $term[1] = 'Term 1'; $term[2] = 'Term 2'; $term[3] = 'Term 3'; $term[4] = 'Term 4'; #$term[5] = ''; #$term[6] = ''; # Teacher/Admin Signature Line # Select who signs the report card (except for the final term) # Accepted values: teacher, principal, or combo. $teachersign = 'teacher'; # Skip printing of any report cards which # have no assessment values for the current term. # 0 = 'Show Everything' 1 = skipBlanks $skipBlankReportCard = 0; # The position of the staff member who show up on report cards... # They have to be a teacher, and have grade and class set correctly # in the teacher data area. $position = 'Classroom Teacher'; # The subject that is 'hidden' on the report card and is used to place # additional comments at the end of the report card. This MUST be the # name of the subject, otherwise it will show up as a normal subject. $additionalcomments = 'Additional Comments'; # The field that is used as a mark. Normally the first one... a1. # It is used to calculate class averages, etc. $markfield = 'a1'; # Evaluation Keys for Various Grades $g_evalsch{PK}="b"; $g_evalsch{K}="b"; $g_evalsch{1}="a"; $g_evalsch{2}="a"; $g_evalsch{3}="a"; $g_evalsch{4}="a"; $g_eval{a}[0]="E - Excellent"; $g_eval{a}[1]="G - Good"; $g_eval{a}[2]="S - Satisfactory"; $g_eval{b}[0]="VG - Very Good"; $g_eval{b}[1]="G - Good"; $g_eval{b}[2]="I - Improving"; # Notes============= # A note section just below evaluation outline on report card. $note1 = 'All comments are those of the Homeroom teacher, unless otherwise indicated.'; # AR Filtering - students who have a failing mark, but teacher doesn't # want to show that mark but only an 'AR' for 'At Risk'. She/He puts # in the mark with a trailing AR (ie. 45AR ). The report card script # will then strip the 45 and display only the AR. $arFilter = 1; # (0=no, 1=yes)
The report card system makes use of a couple of tables as well as the main student table. They are: