In QuickSchools, Academic Terms (or Semesters) provide a way to contain and separate student data. So for example, when you change the courses for a student within an academic term, it does not affect his courses from a previous academic term. And this extends to many modules, like grade levels / programs, subjects and gradebooks, simplified schedules, report cards, standard charges (from the Fee Tracking module), and so on. In this way, you can easily and safely introduce changes to the student record, while keeping archived data intact.

So when you activate a new Academic Term, it makes sense to copy certain information over, instead of recreating everything from scratch. By default, the system will ask you whether you want to copy data forward:

There is an additional area to “Configure” additional information to copy over, like Gradebook Formulas and Admin Columns :

So once the new term is activated, with a copy of the data from the previous term, you can make changes to the new term without affecting the previous term.

Report Cards do NOT copy forward

It’s important to note here that Report Card sessions do NOT copy forward, for a variety of reasons, which we discuss below:

Different Formats for Different Terms

One of the key features within QuickSchools is how easy it is to configure and customize Report Cards. So you could have quarterly report cards that are formatted / configured one way, and a semester or end-of-year report card configured another way. So when you create a new report card session, you will want to specify which previous report card session to use as the source.

Multiple Report Card Sessions with Multiple Dates

Within a particular academic term, you may also decide to have MULTIPLE report card sessions. For example, you may decide to have a mid-term progress report, in addition to an end-of-term report card. Some schools will go insofar as a weekly or monthly progress report, which we support freely.

Auto-Lock Feature

Finally, we should mention that we have an Auto-Lock feature. In the event you forget to Lock/Publish a report card session, when you create a new session, the previous session is automatically locked/published.

So in summary, just be aware that when you create or activate a new academic term, report card sessions are NOT automatically created. You’ll need to create new report card sessions as needed (and there may be multiple). And if you’re re-using the configuration from a previous session, be sure to select that when creating the new session.