Overview of Subject Area Tag Rules

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Subject area tag rules are used by the Graduation Requirements calculation to define rules for the set of courses needed to complete credit requirements for a Career Plan (supplemental) or graduation requirement group subject area. For example, a tag rule would allow you to specify that the student needs to have Algebra II in combination with any one of three other courses to fulfill a Math subject area's credit requirements.

If the buildings in your district are not configured for Career Planner, then the tag rule feature does not apply; the Graduation Requirements calculation will not create alerts. Do not set up tag rules for your graduation requirement groups.

How Tag Rules Affect Student Graduation Requirements and Career Plans

Tag rules do not affect how a student's course credit is applied to a subject area. Instead, the rules are used to create warnings for students who have not earned credits for the specified combinations of courses for a subject area.

• The Graduation Requirements calculation assigns the subject area credits for the student's courses. Then, it analyzes the tag rules based on the student's courses for the subject area.
• If the student has not met the tag rules defined for a subject area, then the Graduation Requirements calculation creates an alert to warn that the student has not met a rule.
• The alert is displayed in the Graduation Requirements report and on the student's Career Plan and Graduation Requirements pages.

• If courses are defined such that they can fill one subject area and then move to another when that is filled, it is possible that students may not meet a tag alert because a course filled a different subject area. Refer to Tag Rules May Require Subject Area Overrides.

Examples of How Tag Rules Can Be Used

District policies related to graduation are often more complex than simply requiring a specific number of credits within a subject area. Tag rules allow you to set up rules to check for the following scenarios:

• Students are required to take three credits of foreign language where at least two of those credits are focused in one language.
• Students take four credits of Math, but at least one of those credits has to be in an Algebra II course.
• Students in a culinary arts supplemental plan are required to take at least one credit of foundation-level courses and one credit of either nutritional cuisine or international cuisine courses.

Defining Tag Rules

Tag rules translate your district's credit requirements for a particular subject area into relationships between course groupings, or tags.

First, courses are assigned to tags using the Graduation Requirement Setup's Assign Tags to Courses page or the Course Catalog.

Then the relationships between course tags are defined as rules on the Subject Area Tag Rules page.

• Within a tag rule, you can set up multiple rules, or options, that students can fulfill to meet the subject area requirement. Each rule describes a valid combination of courses that fulfills the subject area's credit requirement. If multiple rules are defined for a tag rule, then the student will meet the tag rule if the student meets any of the rules.
• Within an individual rule, you can define multiple lines of tag and credit requirements using the AND or OR operator to specify how the lines should be evaluated.

Use Multiple Rules When Students Can Meet Requirements in Multiple Ways

Sometimes it is not clear when requirements would best be defined as multiple rules. For example, your district policy may state that a student is required to take one credit of Biology (Bio) and one credit of either Chemistry (Chem) or Physics (Phys). If you defined one rule, the rule would look like this:

This rule would not return the results you want since a student would meet the requirement if he had Biology and Chemistry credits or only Physics credits.

To define this requirement correctly, you would instead define the two valid ways that students could meet the requirements:

Students must take

• one credit of Biology AND one credit of Chemistry
  OR
• one credit of Biology AND one credit of Physics.

Therefore, you should define two rules

Detailed Examples of Tag Rules

Refer to the following examples for more information on how tag rules can be used.

Requiring Specific Types of Courses for a Technical Education Subject Area

For example, a district has a series of technical education programs that students can complete within a variety of career-oriented subjects, such as carpentry, manufacturing, or web design. Each program has a two-credit requirement. The district uses the subject area VE for vocational education to define the ways students can fulfill the credit requirement within a particular program.

For instance, the Culinary program allows students to earn subject area credit one of two ways, either by taking a course in Culinary Fundamentals and another in Nutritional Science or by taking the Culinary Fundamentals course in combination with an International Cuisine class. Each option is based on students taking courses satisfying curriculum designations handled in eSchoolPlus with course tags.

The district uses course tags as follows for the Culinary program:

• 20 courses are considered Culinary Fundamentals classes. These are tagged as Cul 1.
• 25 courses are considered Nutritional Science classes. These are tagged as Cul 2.
• 20 courses are considered International Cuisine classes. These are tagged as Cul 3.

To complete the Culinary program, the student needs to meet credit requirements in one of two ways:

Option 1 - Earn one credit from courses with the Cul 1 tag (Culinary Fundamentals) and one credit from courses tagged as Cul 2 (Nutritional Science).

Option 2 - Earn one credit from courses with the Cul 1 tag (Culinary Fundamentals) and one credit from courses tagged as Cul 3 (International Cuisine).

To set up this program, the district would follow these steps:

1. Create a Graduation Requirement Setup for the Culinary program.
2. In the Subject Area/Requirements section, select VE, the code for the subject area used to track vocational education credit.
3. Use Tag Rules to create the two rules for the options described above:

Rule 1

Rule 2

Requiring a Specific Number of Foreign Language Credits in One Language

Tag rules are often used to handle cases where only a portion of a subject area's credits needs to come from a specified grouping of courses within the larger subject area. The remaining credits can come from any course in the subject area. In this situation, the appropriate courses are grouped together with a course tag. The tag rule then states how many credits must come from the course tag. The course tag credit needs to be fulfilled along with the overall subject area credit defined on the Graduation Requirements Setup page, even if the tag rule credit is less than the subject area credit.

For example, suppose a district has a foreign language subject area requirement students can fulfill by taking three credits, with at least two of those credits focused in the same language.

To turn this requirement into tag rule options, the district would create a separate course tag for each foreign language offered. For this example, consider a district offering courses in four languages: Chinese, French, German, and Spanish.

Tag rule options would look like this:

Rule 1

Rule 2

Rule 3

Rule 4

For each foreign language offered, there is a tag rule option. Taken in combination with each other, the tag rule options tell the system that a student should complete at least two credits in any one of the languages for the Foreign Language subject area. In the Graduation Requirement Setup, the Foreign Language subject area has a three credit requirement.

The Graduation Requirement calculation will check for the following two conditions:

Has the student taken three credits within the Foreign Language subject area?

• If yes, then the student has fulfilled the credit requirement for the subject area.
• If no, then the student has not met the credit requirement for the subject area. An alert will be created indicating the student has not met the credit requirement.

Are at least two of the credits within the same language, based on the course tags and tag rule options illustrated above?

• If yes, then the student has fulfilled a tag rule for the subject area.
• If not, then the student has not fulfilled a tag rule for the subject area and an alert will be created.

Tag Rules May Require Subject Area Overrides

If courses are defined such that they can fill one subject area and then move to another when that is filled, a student may have an alert that they did not meet a tag rule for a subject area when they have taken courses that would fulfill it. This can occur if a student's course credit for one of the tagged courses was applied to a different subject area. You can override the subject area that is assigned by the Graduation Requirements Calculation so that the course does not overflow into the other subject area.

Example:

• The foreign language courses are set up to fill the two required credits for the Foreign Language subject area and then move to the Elective subject area.
• There are tag rules defined so that the students need to take two credits in the same language.
• In ninth grade, a student took French I. In tenth and eleventh grade, they took Spanish I and II.

Because the student already completed two credits of Foreign Language, the Graduation Requirements calculation:

• assigns the student's Spanish II class to the Elective subject area.
• assigns an alert warning that they did not meet the tag rule for the Foreign Language subject area.

To force the student's Spanish courses to fill the Foreign Language subject area, you can apply subject area overrides on the Graduation Requirements page.