Guides
A school's first week
What to do in the first five days with the product, and the one thing not to do until a term's marks are in.
Setup finishes an afternoon's work; the first week decides whether the term runs easily. This is the order that makes the second week quiet.
Day one: the year exists
Name the year and its terms. Nothing else can be entered before this, so it is the first hour rather than the last.
The academic year
First term
Second term
Third term
A term names nothing on its own: a class, a subject and a placement all point at the year and the term they belong to.
Day two: the people
Add the classes and subjects the year offers, then the students and their placements, then the teachers with their class-and-subject pairs. This is the longest step and the one worth finishing before any marks exist: a mark with no class belongs to nothing.
Day three: one subject, end to end
Pick one subject and enter a small set of marks: an assignment, a class test and an examination for one class. Calculate the result and check it against your own arithmetic.
This is the step that catches a grading policy that is not what the school actually does, and it costs ten minutes on day three rather than a term of corrections.
Day four: one correction
Correct one of those marks through the request path, with a reason. Read what the trail shows. A school that has seen the trail once will use it correctly when it matters.
Day five: stop
Do not publish. Publishing freezes a result set, and the set to freeze is a term's, not a trial's. Delete the test marks if the school prefers a clean term, or leave them in a subject nobody's report depends on.
Running a term is the next page once the first week is done.