The Student Term Table

Key Terminology

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.

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

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.

The student term records can only be created when the first school term has been identified. The first school term is identified in the student record based on the start date. But start dates move over time as adminstrators project when students will enroll, but sometimes they need to enroll sooner or later than anticipated.

The student records also contains a field called 'current program,' which is blank for all new students.  When the current program field has been updated from blank to a selected value, and the start date has been entered and not blank, then the PEMS will trigger the creation of the student term records.  The program field in the student table is where the admin selects the student's plan, and sets up all the classes the student will take over the duration of the plan.

When the student is enrolled, meaning there is a start date and the program has been selected, 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.