Credits Earned Toward Graduation

Credits Earned in Action

Support your high school success initiatives with a new set of credits earned metrics! These data paint a holistic picture of each student when combined with other important metrics. For example, you can:

• Pair with in-progress course failures, grades and GPA to spot declining course performance
• Examine with attendance, absences and behavior for early risk identification

Availability

The Credits Earned metric and configuration for Graduation Plan are available for the following student information systems:

• Aeries
• Aeries API
• Aspen
• edfi
• eSchoolPlus
• Illuminate
• Infinite Campus
• Powerschool
• Synergy
• Tyler

Business Rules

Metric Calculation

Student Metric

How many credits did a student earn in the past five years toward their total graduation plan credit requirements?

• On the student profile tile, the overall metric result shows the cumulative credits earned by the student as of the most recently completed time period.
• By default, the metric uses final grades. It does not include anticipated credits for in-progress grades. Our Support team can remove this filter upon request.
• For example, it is the middle of T2 in the 2019-2020 school year. The value shown for any 11th grader who has progressed one grade level per year includes all credits earned in 2017-2018 as a ninth grader, all credits earned in 2018-2019 as a tenth grader and all credits earned in T1 in the 2019-2020 school year. It does not include any T2 credits.
• The result on the Our Students page reflects the cumulative number of credits earned as of the latest time period in the latest school year for which that student has earned credits.
• The credits earned value may reflect different time periods across students, if schools are on different calendars.
• By default, the metric uses final grades. It does not include anticipated credits for in-progress grades. Our Support team can remove this filter upon request.
• If a student is not linked to a graduation plan, the tile and metric result will not calculate correctly. See the Graduation Plan - Data Configuration section of this article for more information about configuring graduation plans.
• Courses must be associated with a credit area linked to the same graduation plan that is listed as the student's graduation plan in order for earned credits to count toward this metric. If your SIS (like Synergy), supports different requirements within the same plan based on the year or graduation, only the requirements for the most recent year are used in Schoolzilla.
• This metric includes up to five years of data only.

Student Detail Table

How many credits did a student earn toward each required credit area, compared to total required credits?

On the student profile tile, you can click to see the cumulative credits earned by credit area for the graduation plan associated with each student's record in Schoolzilla.

• Courses must be associated with a credit area in the same graduation plan that is listed as the student's graduation plan in order for earned credits to count toward this metric.
• We display the total credits earned in each area, including any credits that exceed the total required. No additional logic assigns "spillover" or "overflow" credits toward an elective requirement or secondary credit area. For example, if a student exceeds the required credits for US History, the extra credits do not count toward World History, nor do they count toward an Elective credit area.

District Metric

Out of my high school students who are enrolled right now, what percent met credit expectations at the end of last year?

This metric shows the percent of currently enrolled high school students who are meeting expectations toward earning required graduation credits.

• This metric computes on an annual and lagging basis. As an example, for a current 10th grader, the metric shows whether they met 9th grade credit expectations based on credits earned by the end of the prior school year.
• During the school year, the district/school metric's time period may differ from the time period of the student metric.
• The denominator of this metric may vary from other metrics, such as enrollment, GPA and Course Failures, because it only shows currently enrolled high school students and excludes students in ninth grade (since they do not have prior grade level expectations).

In order for a student to be considered as meeting expectations or "on-track", the student must meet credit expectations for their prior grade level as of the end of the prior school year.

In addition, the district/school metric uses the graduation plan associated with each student's record to determine how many total required credits are associated with that plan.

Dataset

Default Settings

By default, currently enrolled high school students with a graduation plan record are included in the dataset.

• Ninth graders are excluded from the district/school metric because we do not support credit expectations for eighth grade.
• Ninth graders are included in the student metrics once they have earned credits for final grades in the current school year.
• If a student does not have a graduation plan associated with their record, this student is excluded from the dataset. You can associate a graduation plan with their record by updating the SIS or by using Data Configuration Settings (see below).

For credits:

• Credits must be associated with final grades and courses linked to a credit area in the student's graduation plan.

• Schoolzilla only supports one graduation requirements set per graduation plan/diploma type. If your SIS (like Synergy), supports different requirements within the same plan based on the year or graduation, only the requirements for the most recent year are used.

• For transfer students, earned credits are included even when a student was not enrolled in the district, as long as the credits are tracked in the student information system and are associated with a class linked to a graduation plan credit area.
• Credits earned for courses marked with an "Exclude From GPA" concept in your student information system are counted by default. Credits earned for withdrawn courses are also included, if and only if, a student has earned a final grade for that course. You can choose to remove these credits by requesting dataset filters for these courses via Support.
• The metric calculation reflects a sum of credits earned in all course-sections that are associated with a graduation plan credit area. For example, if a student earns credits in both Biology 1A and Biology 1B, both will be counted.

The total number of years is limited to five years. For example, year 1 data for students who are on track to graduate in six or more years is excluded. As another example, if you adjusted the dataset filters to include credits earned in 7th grade and 8th grade, a current 12th grader's 7th grade data would be excluded if they advanced one grade level each year since 7th grade.

Graduation Plan - Data Configuration Settings

By default, we use the graduation plan associated with each student's record in the student information system to map the total credit requirements to the credits earned for that student in the courses that they have taken.

• If no graduation plan is available for a student, we do not populate any plan by default.
• If a student is missing a graduation plan record, you have two options:
1. You can update this in your student information system. This setting will update the student's record in Schoolzilla's data warehouse overnight.
2. You can select a default graduation plan in Data Configuration Settings. Any student record that does not have a graduation plan associated in the student information system will reflect this updated setting after the nightly refresh. Selecting a default graduation plan will NOT overwrite values for students that already have graduation plan records populated.

Data Structures

This article provides more in-depth information about the underlying data structure used by these metrics, including how we associate a student record with a graduation plan and respective credit areas and how we associate the credit areas with courses.

Known Limitations

• Metrics cannot be filtered to show on-track toward a specific subject, course, or grade level expectation. For example, you cannot filter to show only credits earned in ELA.
• Metrics cannot be copied.
• The logic for determining expected credits at the end of a grade level cannot be configured. For example, you cannot configure 9th grade credit expectations to be based on ELA or Algebra I credits earned.
• The trend line chart does not display on any profiles or in the Explore/Metric Zoom view.
• Tyler customers must upload their graduation plan data through MyData using this template

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the district denominator different than other metrics, such as Course Failures and GPA?

• The credits earned metric includes only currently enrolled students in 10th - 12th grades, whereas the other metrics include students who were ever enrolled in the given time period. The Course Failure and GPA metrics can also be configured to show additional grade levels outside of high school.

Why are there mismatches between my student information system and the student metric?

There are a number of possibilities.

1. Does that student have the same graduation plan associated in Schoolzilla and in your student information system?
2. Are all courses associated with a credit area in the graduation plan in your SIS?
3. Are a student's credits duplicated across the sections for the same course in the SIS?
4. Are the time periods used by the SIS different than the time periods used by Schoolzilla?

If you have further questions about this metric, please reach out to Support.