jmel27

Hi All, I was wondering if anyone used the Options/Options Online part of SIMS? We are looking at possibly using it for our GCSE options for next year as we always used a paper version. Does anyone have any experience with it? Pro, cons? Thanks!

Thanks! I'll get the IT team to give it a go!

Morning All, I had an error on SIMS Exams Organiser: "Component 'mscomctl.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid" Capita sent our IT Team a patch, 17330, and I've been told by our team that it has been installed. I gave it a day or so (therefore restarted a few times in that time period) and the same error is coming up still. Has anyone else had a similar problem & been given a fix that works? Thanks, James

Ah right, I see. Thanks for the response, I'll see about doing that!

Hello All, I took over exams in September and it was briefly mentioned by another exams officer that she did Mock Exams in Exam Organiser as this meant she could generate a seating plan for each exam. Does anyone know how this would be accomplished? I can't seem to get anywhere as I have created a new season but as there is no basedata for it, I can't create seating plans or create a custom timetable. Many thanks, James

Hi Roots, Thanks for the info. I thought it could well be something along those lines. This may well make sense for our mock grades, but setting it up for each individual subject and Year Group (7 Year Groups multiplied by on average 15 subjects = 105 different marksheets to do this for, plus 4 reporting periods per year) doesn't look to be plausible I don't think. Really appreciate the feedback, now I can go back to our Senior Management and tell them it's not really viable. Just the standard If Then Else might be but even so, still a lot of work for something that really isn't hugely necessary. Thanks very much, James

Hi All, Towards the end of the 17/18 academic year we started implementing colour coding onto grade sheets (mainly mock grade sheets) to show at a glance how well the students were doing. We have a separate aspect in SIMS that reflects their target grades for each subject and all I did was use the "Nested If Then Else" to compare the exam result to the target grade. What our headteacher wants now is for 5 colours to be put onto all of our Effort & Attainment grades, rather than 3 seeing as the nested if then else can only do greater than, equal to or more than and it caused issues when kids had target grades of 9, therefore couldn't get a "green" sheet as they couldn't actually get higher. What he wants is the colours to reflect how far above or below target they are, as exampled below: 2+ Grades below - Red 1 Grade below - Light Red/Orange On Target - Light Green 1 Grade above - Green 2+ Grades above - Blue Does anyone know if this is possible? Will it require tons of formulae on every marksheet this is present on? Thanks very much!

Ah that sounds like a pretty reasonable solution. Thanks for that!

Hi All, It's time to import CTFs again and we are having the same problem we have had every year. Primary schools tend to do things differently depending on the school and put some names in capital letters, forget the parental salutation, spell names wrong etc. and when this happens, it either creates a whole extra set of data (i.e. 4 parental contacts, where mum and dad have been put on twice, once as Mr & Mrs Smith and once as just Smith) or it overwrites what our admissions officer has spent a long time inputting. Is there a way to check over what it is coming into SIMS and stop it from duplicating everything simply because of capital letters or a lack of a salutation? Does anyone else have this problem? Many thanks.

That is exactly what I was looking for! I didn't particularly want to spend hours trolling through SIMS menus, that's exactly thank you very much!

The Head of 6th Form wants a report on how many students throughout the course of the year dropped subjects because we apparently didn't keep another record elsewhere!

Hi All, I'm having a slight problem. Does anyone know of a way to find any leavers from specific courses (i.e. kids who dropped courses mid-year). I'm hoping there's a report you can run to get this information, but I'm struggling to find it. Any help would be great. Thanks. James

I find that to be the case with a lot of SIMs though. I think for us, since our technology is pretty ancient our servers take their time updating things. Might have to wait until tomorrow to see. I've created a guide on how to install it seeing as our parents are pretty useless with tech as well, so I'm expecting loads of issues from them. Although if it's similar to yours with them going and not going out, I could be in trouble!

As a side point, is there any way to push the reports through any quicker to SIMS Online? Or do I just have to wait until it decides it wants to do it? We enabled access to it on Friday morning and the website says it can take up to 12 hours for things to get going. I had our staff member check this morning and still nothing on the attendance side. Obviously reports won't be available till they are uploaded onto the SIMS Online server.

Hi, I managed to stumble across the answer while frantically googling (as usual). Capita kindly forgot to inform us that you have to publish the reports under Routines > SLG & Sims Online > Publish Documents. Still not sure about the attendance though. But in response to your question, no she only has the one profile by the looks of it