Student Terms Table

Relevant Topics

A term is the division of the academic year into grading periods. Terms may be semesters or quarters. The term record is a record that indicates the start and end date of each term. Multiple terms are related to academic years. Terms are also related to a Term Label record.

Term Labels are the names of the terms a school is running, like Spring, Fall, etc.  The number of Term Label records indicates the number of terms the school operates.  Term Labels indicate if that term is required or optional, like a summer term.

Student Terms.  There is one term record for every term the school operates.  A student term record contains student-specific information about how the student performed academically in the term, such as the student's grade point average for that term. All the classes a student takes (enrollment records) are linked to the student term.  A student has a term record created for each term they are in attendance. 

Enrollment is the process of signing up for a class.  An enrollment record in the PEMS is the class as student takes in a specific term, and stores the student's final grade.  The set of completed enrollments is the information displayed on the student's transcript.

 

Term Labels

The user adds one “term label” record to represent each term in a general school year.  The number of records in the table equals the number of terms in a year. There are start days and start months fields in the term label records, but there are no actual years since the term label is general in nature and applies to any year. The Terms records are created based on the term label template.

Terms (or School Terms)

Terms are a list of actual terms the school is/was/will be in operation.  They have a start date and an end date, and are associated with an Academic Year and a term label.

Student Terms

Student terms are records created for each student for each term they are enrolled in the school.  Where there is one school term record with a specific start and end date, there are multiple student term records with the same start and end date that are related to each individual student.  Student Term records are child records to term, and also the student.  They describe the many to many relationship between students and terms.

The student term records provide information on the student's academic performance in each school term, and stores the GPA achieved for that term.

Automation

PEMS automatically creates student term records for the student up to the end of the student grade_span.  The student's grade span is determined by the student' s grade level.   The trigger to create these records is a new student record in the student table OR a change to the grade span for the student.

When the student is enrolled, the student term records are created for the student for the entire grade span.  However, if a student enters in the middle of a grade span, student term records are not automatically created for the past terms of the grade span. 

All enrollments are child records to the student term record, and so no enrollments can be made unless there are first student term records created.