Concepts used in student assessments

Learning areas

Academic and non-academic departments or areas within your organisation.
For example, English, Physical Education, Music and SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment).

Subject

Individual subject within a learning area.
For example, individual subjects within Science include Chemistry, Physics, Biology and general science.
Note: Subjects are generally divided into year levels and classes. For example, Science Year 7 (classes 7A - 7F), Year 8 (classes 8A - 8E) to Year 12 (classes 12A and 12B).

Subject Assessment Areas

Criteria used to assess students.
For example:

• work practices
  
• project grades
  
• assignment results
  
• test results
  
• exam results.
  
  Subject Assessment Areas are often also divided into year levels and classes.
  Note: There can only be one set of assessment criteria for a subject in a reporting period.
  If you have different assessment criteria, you need to create a new subject. For example, you may need to create one subject for interim reports and another for the end of semester reports if they have different sets of criteria.

Classes

Individual classes in the subject. Classes are groups of students, generally imported from a timetabling program. Teachers are also linked to Classes.
For example, Year 11 Politics A and Year 11 Politics B. Classes usually share the same assessment criteria.

Mark Book

Mark books are generally used to define areas of assessment used internally at your organisation.
For example, topic tests and assignments that are not usually part of the mainstream class assessment. These assessments are not usually printed on semester reports but can be.
Student mark book results are stored for each reporting period so that you can enter a fresh set of results each period or term if required. The setup of mark book areas is linked to classes and can be copied across reporting periods throughout the year if required, provided that the correct semester or term creation rules have been set up.
See Maintaining student file semesters in the Synergetic Curriculum manual.
For example, for Art the main required assessment areas might be:

• work requirements
  
• project
  
• exam mark.
  The art teacher has held several topic tests and recorded student attitudes towards class. The teacher wants to record the test and project results somewhere on the system so that they can be archived but not printed on the normal end of term report.

Result Groups

Subject assessment areas can be grouped together to make them easier to work with in Results Maintenance, if a subject assessment has a lot of areas.
For example, you might:

• have results for a work requirement
  
• group parts of an overall project.

Result Type

Defines the result value.
For example, a:

• grade could have values A, B, C and D
  
• mark could have a numeric value between 0 and 100.