bobsmith

I was eyeing up TASC Insight, but then I had a demo of ConnectEd which while it does less at the moment had a very cool interface for parents and can also reduce your communication costs to parents to virtually zero using an App rather than text messages. It all depends on your exact brief, what you want it to do versus what you need it to do. From looking around it really does look like there are a lot of viable alternatives.

I sent an email with two screenshots showing staff how to do this themselves, in the long run I feel this is a better solution as marksheets can get very crowded with all the aspect columns and then all the potential additional columns. When I arrived here somebody had done what you've been asked to do, there were at least 5 additional columns on marksheets and staff were struggling to see the important (data entry!) columns in all the mess on screen. If you want the master template hierarchy you want to look at CMIS rather than SIMS, marksheets used to take me no time at all as you only had to set up one plus the exceptions for the subjects that used a different format.

Yes, you need to get their requirements from them, Teachers brains often work in mysterious ways - looking it up yourself on the exam board website *might* look like the sensible and proactive thing to do, but they rarely do things that make sense. Normally more resultsets are the answer, but in your particular case it struck me that you needed more aspects. The simple logic behind it is, aspects store "things" and resultsets are used to store that "thing" if it is recorded more than once at different times of the year.

can you post a screenshot of your marksheet showing the calculation of the difference please? also a screenshot of your nested if then else would be very handy.

create unique aspects and keep your result sets simple. So Aspect = maths unit 1, resultset = autumn rather than aspect = maths, resultset = autumn unit 1

I can't see the ICO having an issue with you using a UPN to match up data on an internal spreadsheet, as long as it is cleansed before it's published to anyone, it's more of a matter of not sharing it willy nilly (and by that we mean to any numpty to who might accidentally release it to someone outside the organisation). The ULN is issued at age 14 (year 8) and is supposed to supplant the UPN for matching up students across institutions and with exam boards etc. It only exists because they didn't safeguard the UPN properly and it's possible to generate duplicate UPNs as well as change them. Unlike the UPN the ULN is given to students so that they can pass use it throughout their education to preserve continuity of their educational records. The issue for me with admission number (as mentioned by a previous poster) is that not only do pre-admission pupils not get one, but guest students don't get one either, and as part of a sixth form consortium we have a load of guest students each year. A proper primary key field available on the marksheet export would be worth it's weight in gold @PhilNeal

oh yeah, forgot to mention, I would normally delete the UPN from my spreadsheet after the vlookup has been run. A quick "copy and paste special" to fix the data first of course! the UPN is invaluable for getting a decent match on internal spreadsheets, but don't leave it visible!

a happy assistant head is the best kind

your easiest and more importantly most reliable bet will be to use admission number in the template - and then run a report to dump out admission number and UPN, makes for error free vlookups.

Yes, if the columns you add to the template are the same ones that the teachers have completed already.

yes, create a template and marksheet for it, don't bother trying to do it through reports. You may have to do a vlookup in excel to bring the UPN into it, as I don't think UPN is available through the marksheet additional columns.

You need it for the exam results day.

have you got "calculate on data entry" enabled on the template?

I had the demo for Progresso a few years back, this was before the "troubles" when it went a bit quiet on the Progresso front. Gotta say that it was a radical departure from Facility CMIS, but in a good way, it looked like a properly modern MIS and the vast amount of stuff you could make it do was impressive. Stuck with SIMs at my new job, it's not the nightmare I was led to believe it would be, but I regularly curse the 1990s interface.

took me 2 days to get a response to a call this week, but when they finally left a message on myaccount for me I just called em and asked to speak direct to the person named, got me through straight away. They do tend to respond faster to phone calls than jobs logged on the site.

If you put the description straight into the template on a row with a result, you can use "hide rows without results" to remove it for subjects the student doesn't have results for.

You only need to use profiles if you want to do statement banks, otherwise it's a lot of faf that is much much easier done using comment aspects in an individual report.

This discussion was foccused around individual reports - but the principles are the same. But yes, it's a different menu. Focus - Profiles - Session Manager Then at the bottom of the selected session in section 4 - printing options - there should be "ignore courses with no entries" - make sure it's ticked.

that's the trick, if you have the option ticked for "hide rows with no results" and "remove report sections that contain no results" Then those bits that pertain to subjects that students don't have any results for will be omitted. If you've done something silly like give all students a result in your ict aspect (even if they don't study it) then sims will put the result in.

it's a MS word table.

Since the DfE haven't decided what the boundaries are (and probably won't until they get the results in summer 2016) you'll be guessing like the rest of us. At the moment I'm using fine grades (A*1, A*2 etc) - using the fine grades A*1 = 9, A*3 = 8, A = 7, B2 = 6, C1 & B3 = 5, C3 & D1 = 4, E = 3, F= 2, G = 1 BUT I'm going to be amending my lookup tables whenever the DfE announce their latest tweak to their intentions. Our staff will be using A*-G until the first cohort actually sit their new 9-1 GCSEs.

If I've read the above correctly, that's not a residual as commonly expressed, it's RAGing (Red, Amber, Green for below, on, above) - explains my misunderstanding. Residuals are commonly used to compare performance in one subject against all the others taken by a student, so maths estimate - average of all other subject estimates = residual (positive is better in maths than the average and vice versa). This is easy even using the mixed currency of A*-G and 9-1 provided you either have common points values for both systems, or a lookup that converts the grades to a common points system. My Marksheets for september will be something like this: KS2 score | FFT Estimate | Last Tracking Grade from previous year | Autumn 1 Tracking | Autumn 2 Tracking | etc | The tracking would be RAG'ed each term against FFT Estimate.

so how do you currently calculate residuals? Can you give an example of the formula?

the APS on key to success for any given cohort should be the one that the DfE will use for that cohort when it comes to the calculations - so it should be the correct one. As for residuals - are you planning on calculating them yourself in a spreadsheet? Have you done this before - or is someone else demanding it?

yep - output a list of the UPNs for all of year 9, copy and paste into the "searchable pupil data" screen.