Some districts may want to begin reviewing their SIF SCS errors for the End of Year SCS Report.  Please find below some valuable information to prepare your site to transmit SIS data through SIF and to alert you to some known issues and concerns.

Known Issue:

• SCS SIF Error  = Course Enrollment Status (SCS08) not valid for Course Letter Mark (SCS12) and/or Course Numeric Mark (SCS13)
  • Course status SCS08 does not always match SCS12, and SCS13
    • Example   SCS08 = 03 and SCS12 = 99 and SCS13 = 88888
    • Example   SCS08 = 02 and SCS12 = 99 and SCS13 = 88888
    • Example   SCS08 = 01 and SCS12 = 21 and SCS13 = 21111

Known Concerns:

• Additional Terms – Additional “fake” terms (ie. FY, S1, S2) are needed for the SIF Student Sections Enrollment and the Student Section Marks records to transmit.

Note: You can turn on your additional terms now if you want to start checking your errors, but be aware this may impact daily use of iPass. We are actively working on a way to hide these additional terms so that they will be available for SIF without having this daily impact.

• Disables the iTeacher Seating Chart
• Affects the link to Update Period Attendance from the Daily Attendance screen
• Affects screens that initialize on terms – FY is selected as a default making the screen not find what you are looking for

• Non-Credit Courses – Courses cannot show on transcript if set up for SIF as non-credit courses. Currently, you need to set all courses worth zero (0) credit to Print on Transcript = NO in the course catalog.

Note: We are investigating other ways to have courses be non-credit but allow them to show up on the transcript.

Recommendations:

• Set up additional terms – This will send a SIF Event to the DOE with the Term Info Records for the additional terms. *(See Known Concerns above that may impact daily use of iPass.)
  • On the Academic Year Setting screen, highlight the FY, S1 or S2 terms you may have shut off
  • Give these newly highlighted terms a Start and End Date (ie. FY should start on first day of school and end on last day of school; S1 should start on first day of T1 and end on last day of T2; S2 should start on first day of T3 and end on last day of T4/last day of school)

Note: Be sure that your school calendars and Academic Year Setting Start/End Dates have been adjusted for snow days with accurate term dates and last day of school.

• Set Term (display) Order of  additional terms (ie FY, S1, S2) = 0
• Check SIF Mapping to make sure the additional terms are highlighted there

• Check your reports on the DOE Security Portal for errors.
  • If “No Data Found” is seen for a school or a large amount of records are missing, we can push your data to the DOE to refresh that information.  This may be due to the additional terms being turned off. Enter an eSupport ticket to request that your SCS data be pushed to the DOE in SIF.  *(See Known Concerns above that may impact daily use of iPass.)

(Posted April 15, 2015)