Setting up a school

Setup is one sitting and it asks for four things, in an order that matters: the year, the classes and subjects the year offers, the people, and the grading defaults. Everything after that is entry rather than configuration, so an hour spent here saves a term of corrections.

The four things setup asks for

1. The academic year, named the way the school names it, with its terms.
2. The classes and subjects that year offers. A class belongs to a year, so this is a per-year list rather than a fixed catalogue.
3. The people: an administrator for the school, and teachers assigned to a class and a subject together.
4. The grading defaults per subject: the categories, what each weighs, the precision a mark is reported at, and the rounding rule.

What to decide before you start

Two decisions are worth making in advance, because both are harder to change once a term has marks in it:

• The shape of the year. Three terms, two semesters, four quarters, or something else. The product states whatever the school states, but it cannot state two shapes for one year.
• The grading policy. Not the arithmetic, which is simple, but the policy around it: which assessments count, what they are worth, and how a result is rounded.

What setup does not do

It does not import a spreadsheet, create a timetable, or send invitations to guardians. Those are not in this release, and what the product is lists the whole of what it holds.