Overview of Minimum Mark Requirements

If your district policy requires a student to receive at least a minimum mark in a subject area in order to fulfill graduation requirements or career plans, then you can set up mark thresholds for a subject area. For example, you may require that students have at least a mark of C in order to earn subject area credit. A minimum mark requirement is only needed when the subject area's mark requirement is higher than the district's policy for earning course credit.

If the point value for the student's mark falls below the selected minimum mark's point value, then the student does not earn credit toward that graduation requirement group subject area, even if the student actually earned credit for the course.

In addition to the student not receiving credit for the course, an alert is also generated if the student's building is configured for Career Planner. Alerts are included in the Graduation Requirements report and displayed on the Graduation Requirements and Career Plan pages.

Note

Minimum mark processing does not affect whether the student earns credit for the course in general. This feature only affects subject area credits applied for graduation requirements and career plans.

How the Graduation Requirement Calculation Processes Minimum Mark Requirements

When the Graduation Requirement calculation is run for a student, the system performs minimum mark checking for subject area courses from the student's graduation requirement group and Career Planner requirement groups.

Following is a summary of the steps the system goes through:

1. First, the system determines which subject areas have Area Credit to fill for the course. For completed courses, Area Credit is based on Earned Credit. For courses that are in progress, Area Credit is based on Attempted Credit.
2. If the course can fill subject area credit, the calculation checks the student's mark reporting records to see if the course received a grade for a mark type entered in the appropriate Graduation Requirement Setup's Mark Type for Minimum Mark Requirement field.
3. For each course with a grade for a Minimum Mark mark type, the calculation checks whether all the student's marks for the mark type are equal to or above the Mark Value defined for the course subject area. The building's level table is used to determine the order of marks.
   • If minimum mark requirements are met for the applicable mark types, then the student gets the course's credit applied to the graduation requirement or Career Planner subject area.
   • If at least one applicable mark falls below the minimum mark threshold, the student does not get subject area credit. If a Career Planner configuration exists for the student's building, then an alert is also created indicating that the student did not meet the minimum mark requirement.

Considerations for Defining Mark Requirements

Before you define which report card mark types use minimum mark processing for your graduation requirement group subject areas, you should review the mark type setups and level tables for your district's high schools. Ideally, mark type setups should be the same for these buildings. If this is not the case, then you at least need the mark types used in minimum mark calculation to be implemented the same way for all your high schools in terms of when courses issue marks and when courses meet.

This is because graduation requirement groups are defined at the district level whereas mark types are defined at the building level. So, it is possible to have the same mark type code applied differently from one building to another. This may cause students to receive subject area credit differently when the Graduation Requirement Calculation is run. You do not want students in one building to have different Graduation Requirement and Career Planner minimum mark rules from peers in another building.

To ensure mark type processing is handled uniformly for all high schools:

1. Decide how minimum marks should be processed for your district.
   Do students need to meet the minimum mark once, at the end of the course? Or do they need to meet the minimum mark multiple times, for instance, on a marking period basis?
   Keep in mind that if you choose a mark type issued multiple times, then you are saying students only earn subject area credit if they meet the minimum mark each time the mark type issues a grade for a course.
2. Using Administration > Mark Reporting Setup > Calculation Setup > Graduation Requirements Setup, open an existing record, then click the button for the Mark Type Used for Minimum Mark Requirement field. Print the mark types listed in the drop-down.
3. Review how the mark types are defined for each building for which you calculate graduation requirements. Assess the mark types based on decisions made in Step 1, and note the codes that appear to meet district needs.
4. Review the Level tables for each building for which you calculate graduation requirements. Make sure the point value is appropriate for the minimum mark in all buildings. Then review the point values for marks that you expect to fall below the minimum mark to make sure that the point values are set appropriately. If needed, make changes to your level tables.
5. Confer with the appropriate personnel in your district regarding how they use the mark types you gathered from Step 3. Based on this analysis, determine which mark types you will assign to graduation requirement groups for minimum mark processing.