[sims] Housekeeping old aspects

[DeeGee]

In the seven years I've been here, we've been through several different assessment systems, using a variety of aspects with different gradesets.

 

As the trust expands I'm going to need to get other staff working on assessment, and although it's easy enough for me to know which aspects are used or not, it's not so easy for the others.

 

So I want to do some housekeeping to remove the unused aspects from being able to be chosen.

 

I can't make these aspects Inactive as they contain results. Is there a more elegant way of doing this than putting Zs at the beginning of the unused stuff, like we can with unused result sets?

 

Or is there another way that I can archive old results so they are no longer getting in the way?

[studio]

If there are going to be other users using assessment, then the best way would be to make heavy use of categories and train the users to always find an aspect from a category.

[Jonsi]

Came across this thread. Is it correct that you cannot make an aspect inactive once a result is attached to it, even if it's not used in any template etc? I'm looking to hide our old aspects and find this very surprising. Thanks

[bobsmith]

if there is a result attached to it (and you don't want to delete that result) then yes. I can understand the rationale behind this too, remember that SIMS doesn't use datasets the way some other MIS do, so all data stored at any point in a student's career is accessible.

 

Personally I've been ZZ'ing aspects that aren't deletable but that aren't of any use, and you can also recycle them if it's just a change of gradeset needed, as they are date linked.

 

Categories seem a sensible way to go when my aspect list grows some more, just move them to "archive" category, or even a category for each academic year.

[RootsSchImp]

If you're comfortable using MS access then I'd recommend running a report from sims to create an archive of all the old results in case someone wants to look at them (which they probably won't). Then bulk delete them from sims. The extra time you may spend extracting old results you more than make up for by having a cleaner, user friendly system.

[Jonsi]

Thank you both for your suggestions. I have been using categories - it would be frustrating creating templates without them - so I have put them in an Archive category. Since they're old internal tracking stuff, I think I'll leave them there for a while then delete them from SIMS.

[CAM]

If it isn't broken, don't try and fix it. Goes double for databases. Plus you never know when you might go back and look at data, especially with the government chopping and changing things (not that long ago I didn't realize how important KS2 data would be!)