iceman

This follows on from a previous thread (import historical grade data, can it be done?) but started a new one as its a new topic. In relation to the assessment structure that I have outlined below, can someone please clarify simply the relationship between templates and marksheets and best practice in making them with minimal effort and maximum flexibility? I remember a data manager complaining to me in the past about the hundreds of templates - or was it marksheets? that they had to recreate each year and it seemed to me that they must be misunderstanding the process and there must be a better way. I want to do it that better way! The new assessment structure the deputy wants is as follows; Years 7-11 will all have 6 assessment points (AP_1 to AP_6) in each academic year, in every subject At each Assessment Point, every student will be scored as integer 1-9 in up to 6 Assessment Objectives (AO_01 to AO_6). The actual criteria for scoring differs between subjects but the name/description of each AO is the same between all subjects and years There will be a single baseline score for every student on entry. I am calling this Assessment point zero (AP_0). It won't change but might be allocated in any year, depending upon when they join the school. Following advice given to me in my other thread, I have: made 7 Aspects, one for each of the Assessment Objectives AO_0 to AO-6. I have allowed scores of 0-9 (where 0 will represent nothing has been entered by the staff) made 35 result sets, one for each yeargroup/assessment point; Year_07_AP_00, Year_07_AP_01, Year_07_AP_02 ... Year_11_AP_06 Now I want to make the templates and then the marksheets. As the assessment structure is the same for evey year group it would appear I only need one template for the whole school but the creation process asks me for Group and Course Link, implying I need a different one for every subject and / or year group. And then do I need a separate marksheet for every class - and have to re-create these marksheets every year when the class codes change? Is that what took so long for the data manager? Confused! Any advice on good template & marksheet creation very welcome. Incidentally also following advice I have assigned categories to the aspects but although I tried to assign all subjects to one aspect by ticking the box next to 'Subject' it didn't seem to do it. Surely I don't have to manually tick each subject category?

Yes, things have slightly moved on as the school now want to use the numerical 1-9 GCSE grade for scoring, right from Y7 so the historical data would need some manipulation to allow things like my flight paths to seamlesly span before and after changeover. It might be worth me telling the school it can't be done. I almost certainly would be using reports that are run each night to extract data and insert it into my SQL database so that I know my db is always up to date. Then I would be using the db and the system I have developed to do the analysis and generate 'paper' reports for parents/ slt etc as I need to combine the assessment data from sims with other data from external online agencies. I try to completely avoid any manual operations such as putting stuff into Excel and then moving it somewhere else / doing mail merge etc. My systems expect users to just click a button on a menu to get the whole job done. But a question: If I wanted say the last 16 assessments for French for a particular Y9 student (so we can see progress over time) then at 6 assessment points a year that would span 2.5 years, Y7, Y8 and half of Y9. A sims report requires me to say which result set I want, so how would I tell it I want 16 different result sets all at once - together with the date of the result set so I can later tell what chronological order the scores are in? Bear in mind that this a a computer doing all this, not a human, so the computer wouldn't know that by 'Y7 collection 1' I mean the scores for all these students when they were in Y7 as opposed to the scores for students who are currently in Y7. Or would it? Sorry for these daft questions. Since retiring from active teaching I've been continuing to develop data analysis software to aid school improvement, mainly for the school where I used to work, so I haven't actually touched SIMS for a while, although some of the software I wrote five years ago downloads stuff from it every night. But now the school wants to move back to using assessment manager and need me to help them design the system.

Ah, OK I see the distinction. The bit about not entering data all on the same day is particularly relevant. I'll prototype using results sets and see how it goes. Thank you.

By all results I really meant all results for a particular aspect (using the English term not necesserily sims) eg The school I am working for wants to do an assessment and record a numerical score for each of 6 assessment objectives (AO1, AO2, AO3 etc..) for each subject, giving around 50 scores per student per assessment. It will cary out this assessment several times a year, probably 6 or 8. After each assessment, for each student it then wants to perform some analysis within each subject (say, take the average of the 6 Assessment Objectives) and also cross subject (say take the average of one Assessment objective over all subjects taken). All this will be reported to parents along with a RAGed indication for each score indicating whether the current score for each of the fifty assessment objective / subject combinations is better, worse or the same as the one from the previous assessment date. I will try to do much of this directly in SIMS but will suspect I will probably find it simpler to just replicate all the relevant data; staff, students, classes, subjects, scores etc in a small sql database, populate it each night via automated reports and then write an external program to query the database, do the analysis and generate the final pdf reports. That's what I am used to doing with other data. Certainly in such a case the data would be very row oriented, not column oriented. ie to store a single score the data fields might be something like UPN, Subject_code, AO_number, Asssessment_date, Score with one row for every combination of UPN, subject_Code, AO and Assessment_date I may be rather dumb though but so far I cannot understand the benefit of using result sets or not in an application like this since a result set can only hold one set of values.

@bobsmith But how do you then easily analyse the results over time? ie suppose I want to know who in Year 7 has increased their score from 'autumn 1' to say 'spring 3' ? Or maybe I want all the scores so far for Year 7 so I can plot a flight path graph. As the result sets all have completely different names it would appear I have to do a different, rather lengthy query for every report I want ie show me 'year7 autumn 2' & 'Year 7 autumn2' & 'year7 spring1 & Year7 spring 2' etc or maybe subtract 'year 7 autumn 2' from 'Year 7 autumn2'. If I don't use result sets then I can just give the aspect (is that the right word) the single name 'Year 7 score' and ask sims to 'show me all the scores for year 7, by student, ordered by date. Am I misunderstanding here?

Hi Vikpaw - another name I recognise from the old days! Thanks for all the ideas from everyone. Yes I do use the upn, although a long time ago I also used the sims admission number because although it was technically possible to have duplicate UPNs in the early days it was not possible to have duplicate admission numbers unless the studente was enrolled twice. The online system as it stands at one time did extract the upn together with the students' names from SIMS, so the UPN I have downloded from it should be able to match straight back into SIMS again. One question @LosOjos though, I'm a bit reluctant to use result sets because if I understand it correctly I need to make a new result set - with a new name - for every data collection point. So with six collections a year, after a few years I will have lost of different names for my result sets. My concern is how I would then be able to automate the analysis of the data outside of sims when there is no obvious way, apart from the textual name, to tell the chronological order of results. Using just aspects at least would allow me to use the date to identify when the result was captured and the order of results. Is this right?. Great help from everyone. - There will probably be more postings from me soon as I have just had a meeting at the school to discuss their new vision for doing criteria referenced assessments instead of simple gradings - by September!

Useful stuff. @MattMitchell I can't use a speadsheet directly as my database already contains around 200,000 grades, far too many to put into a spreadsheet with one grade per row.

Thank you for taking the time for a clear explanation. Having different results sets for each occasion makes sense. I suppose that when creating a report (say as a mailmerge) one could include several resultsets at once so that progress could be indicated.

Thanks LosOjos, you are one of the helpful ones I was referring to! Yes I can program so going the XML route shouldn't be a problem. I'll experiment with what you suggest. I remember doing something similar with a test export when I needed the exact syntax to run a SIMS report with parameters from Delphi to get an export of attendance data from sims every night. You seem to be suggesting that I would be able to import say, Fred's English grades for Easter 2013 and Easter 2014 into a single aspect and results set yet keep the chronology of the grades separate. Is that correct?

Haven't been here for a while but I remember how helpful everyone used to be I played around with SIMS extensively producing assessment analysis stuff when I was teaching. Since I retired my old school has used a company based online system to enter/store grade data and I have written a data analysis suite that downloads the data, stores it in a SQL database and performs various analyses, plots flight paths etc. Now the schools wants to return to using SIMS to record the assessments and want me to overseee the process. I can probably remember all the stuff about aspects/marksheets and result sets for 6 assessment points per year etc but I'd like to pre-populate SIMS with the grades they have been entering online for the past few years and which I now have in my database. If I had an aspect called say 'Estimated_Grade', is there a way I could import all the historical estimated grades I already have for different students, subjects and assessment points and get them associated with the correct assessment point in SIMS? I would have available name, upn, subject_code, class_code, date, grade_date, assessment_point and grade (plus other stuff) and could export from my SQL database in different formats such as csv, xml etc. The issue would be around somehow associating the date or assessment point of each grade with a particular result set. Would I be able to just have one called say 'Easter_progress_point' and use it to store grades from many different student/subjects and Easters from different years?

The fields I use are the adno and upn and then a sub report of the various bits of attendance marks that I want, filtered to where 'Mark Date is after ...' AND 'Mark Date is Before...' with a user defined prompt string for both (with no spaces in them! - Sims is rather notorious for producing field names and parameters containing characters not easily used by other database systems). The report is designed with sensible, but arbitrary, dates hard coded in it for the before and after dates (If I remember correctly the dates I use are after 15th August 2009 and before 29th July 2010.) On its own, if it were to be run prior to july 2010 that would produce loads of attendance marks of '-' meaning they were missing because they were in the future. But as the report also has 'prompt at runtime' checked, if you run it directly from sims that's exactly what it will do and it will ask for the two parameters of before and after dates (so you can test it). However if you run it via CR it will expect the parameters to come from a params file or else directly via an XML string, which is what I give it. When my attendance system refreshes its data it first generates the two dates it wants ie for 'after' it uses the day before the first day of the current academic year and for 'before' is uses the date of the Saturday of the last week to contain a teaching day before the current date, taking into account holidays. It then passes those dates to command reporter as the parameters. That way I only get attendance marks in the range I need.

@LosOjos I found that as well. That's why I did it in a rather more verbose way, but at least I had more control. PS you have a PM from me

LosOjos, I have managed successfully to pass xml parameters directly to CR to do roughly what you are trying to do. I did it via a batch file first to get it working but in the finished app I build up the parameter string and send the whole command line to CR via by creating a new process on the fly. The relevant bit of code is below (in Pascal). The variables StrDateBefore and StrDateAfter are strings of the form 2011-05-12 params := ''; params := params + ' /PARAMS:"'; params := params + ''; params := params + ''; params := params + 'Mark date'; params := params + 'Date'; params := params + 'MarkDateBefore'; params := params + ''; params := params + '' + StrDateBefore + 'T00:01:00'; params := params + ''; params := params + ''; params := params + ''; params := params + 'Mark date'; params := params + 'Date'; params := params + 'MarkDateAfter'; params := params + ''; params := params + '' + StrDateAfter + 'T23:59:00'; params := params + ''; params := params + ''; params := params + '"'; The trick I found I needed was to add a time part to the date as well. so the whole string as generated would be something like then I put that string after all the other parameters that get sent to CR (sims username, report name etc) It not much different to putting it in a file and passing the name of the file but doing it this way saves one more step and fully automates the process.

Yes, Vikpaw, I am aware and agree, hence my caution.

I don't want to advertise (I do really but don't think its appropriate here;)) but over the last few years I have developed a stand alone, compiled, application to do all sorts of analysis and reports on attendance, including a weekly league table of students' attendance. It takes the data from sims each night and produces league tables, summary reports, percentages, certificates, colour coded attendance bands etc. Works with either vertical or horizontal tutor groups. It's already in use in other schools. If you are interested send me a PM and I could send you some screen shots. (Haven't yet got a posh web site for it, but I'm working on that!)

Might I ask why? ie why is XML easier. I use csv at the moment and it looks to me that the filesize of xml is so much bigger with all the tags and stuff, plus importing csv is more of less universal. I can't see any advantage. What am I missing?

Do you use the go4schools behaviour module? If so I'd be very interested in seeing what the layout of the weekly student report looks like - the one that shows the cumulative total score each week. regards

@vikpaw - That sound interesting, I guess you mean the sims server. Please could you point me to some documentation on that. Currently I use the Windows scheduler to run a compiled program that does the exports each night via CR but that requires some fiddly setting up in the schools' servers to make sure it has the rights to see CR and my program. During the installation of my application I can automate the importing of the repdefs, if I could automate the setting up of a report running schedule at the same time it would be so much better. An addition to the Joe Bloggs thing. I recently visited a school were somebody had copied / saved one of my reports causing the author to change. I imported an upgraded report with the same name but was then unable to delete the original as I was no longer the owner.

Cache - The last one - interesting. Makes me wonder how sims identifies a report. Seems like a lot of effort to code something that checks both the name and the date and only allows you to run the latest one. Can't see why sims bothers to store all the others if you can never run them. Ah well, being a software engineer the unique way some of the 'features' in sims operate never ceases to amaze me. Vikpaw - and I thought you were all knowing! ...Some sort of uber sims BTW how did you manage to get thanked 565 Times in only 472 Posts? Regards

I've noticed that whilst it is not possible to edit a report in SIMS and do a 'save as' with a name that already exists, it is perfectly possible to use a repdef to import a report with the same name as one that already exists. (just done so by mistake and ended up with three reports with the same name but different fields. ) In this case how can I tell which one will get run when you run it with CommandReporter?

OK, done

Yes I thought is was encrypted when I had a look at it with a hex editor. I guess it picks up the name from the installation of sims. This is a shame as they are to be distibuted as part of an application package developed and distributed via a separate entity that is part of the school yet logically separate. The real school name is incidental and might even confuse the recipients as to the source. Ther's probably no way round it but I'll keep investigating.

In my work I export a report from SIMS to a repdef and then import it again at another institution. However, in the new institution I'd rather have the 'supplier' column of the report browse list show some sort of trading name instead of the real school name from where the report originated. I've seen some non school, generic names like this on our own reports so it must be possible. Anyone know how it can be done?

Thanks for your efforts Arthur but it still gets mangled when being pre-processed by CreateProcess(), which appears to do escape character conversions all of its own before even CR sees it and still splits on spaces and refuses to send out any quote chars. Ah well, you have pointed me in the right direction. Another project to put on my laptop for the summer holidays!

Arthur, I couldn't get it to work. The whole /PARAMS: value must also be in double quotes as it contains spaces and CreateProcess delimits by spaces. I tried /PARAMS:""Mark date Date MarkDateBefore2011-06-11T00:01:00Mark date Date MarkDateAfter2010-08-15T23:59:00\""' And got the following passed into commandreporter (actually a dummy version of CR that simply prints out its parameters) Paramcount = 15 parameters passed are: 0: C:\Program Files\sims\sims .net\commandreporter.exe 1: /USER:d 2: /PASSWORD:x 3: /REPORT:SITKA_Attendance 4: /OUTPUT:K:\Howards Documents\SITKA\jobs\Attendance\Delphi version\delphi code version 2\init\SITKA_Attendance.csv 5: /PARAMS:6: id=\DDNzGLsaAUi8eGtd+3PIGw== 7: subreportfilter=\True>Mark 8: date 9: Date 10: MarkDateBefore2011-06-11T00:01:0011: id=\eNvt6kqoTcUAoHB2VMyWRg== 12: subreportfilter=\True>Mark 13: date 14: Date 15: MarkDateAfter2010-08-15T23:59:00\ Did you get your result passing the string to CreateProcess() which then called argstest with the parameter or did you call argstest directly. Obviously there is quite a difference as there is only one layer of parsing with the latter whereas with createprocess() the line gets mangled before argstest even gets to see it.