[sims] 4 Term Academic Calendar - SISM

[mutindac]

Hi,

 

Just wanted get some feedback with regards to SIMS capability (or lack of) for the support for a 4 Term Calendar year, and how that might it's operations, as it is usual geared towards a 3 Term System. In our case we operate on a Jan-Dec Academic Calendar and we were keen to know if we implemented it what issues we might face. In particular for timetabling and report.

 

Please share your experiences and thoughts.

 

Regards,

 

Charles

[Linfit]

You can define, (indeed you have to) the academic year as part of the set up process, and the structure of this can vary from year to year provided the next follows on from the previous.

By default, you get three terms, but you can add additional ones, change the names, and define holidays how you wish within the year. I know there are some schools in the UK

that have a four term year and its a fair bet, given its high market share over here, that some of them use SIMS.

[vikpaw]

There is no issue with a 4 term system because it doesn't care about terms. It's just a bunch of dates. Though the UK is a 3 term system, it was i thought supposed to be moving to a 6 term more spread out system. So instead of half terms you just had 6 shorter terms. As far as SIMS is concerned it would just be a renaming of the holiday. I think just before i left i had started calling them Terms 1-6.

 

So, timetabling will be fine, you can set up custom date ranges for that if required.

Reports is where you'll have extra work, but only if you are changing from a 3-term to a 4-term. If you're starting from scratch it won't make a difference. this is because the most common usage is to have resultsets labelled by the term, e.g. Y7 T1, Y7 T2, etc. So if you want to do more gradings you'll need to set up lots more of those and then the corresponding marksheets to store the data. No big issue though so i wouldn't worry about it.

 

What do you use now?

[mutindac]

Thanks so much everybody for your input it was exactly what I was looking for.