Academic Settings: Academic Years

Academic years help organize almost all of your school's information—including academics, admissions, student billing, and some portions of financial aid. In Academics, they define your degrees, provide standard timeframes for reporting, and, through academic terms, they also define your courses, student grades, registration, and so on.

Within academic years, you can operate two different types of terms:

• Standard terms are used for the regular academic seasons at your school during which you offer the majority of your courses. These typically have standard admissions, enrollment, grading, and billing requirements; think Fall Semester and Spring Semester. Standard terms are considered the “cardinal” academic terms around which the normal academic year is defined. The timeframe of a standard term cannot overlap with that of any other standard term.
• Non-standard terms designate special programs, courses of study, or any other unusual academic offering that doesn't quite "fit" within the standard academic year. A Summer semester with "make-up" courses offered on an as-needed basis would be a natural for the non-standard designation. Non-standard terms may overlap with that of any other term, standard or non-standard. The only constraint is that they must fall entirely within the academic year that contains them. For example, a non-standard term in the 2023-2024 year must start and end sometime between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2024.

Here's how to add a new academic year and organize it with academic terms and closures.

Step 1: Create the academic year

1. Go to Academics > Settings > Academic Years.
2. Click Add academic year.
3. Enter the start and end years. These are consecutive, regular calendar years—e.g. 2013 and 2014, 1897 and 1898, 1982 and 1983, etc.
4. Click that Save button!

Step 2: Add academic terms

You can't do very much with an Academic Year until you add Academic Terms to it.

1. Click the academic year you just created to go to the year's page.
2. Click edit next to Terms.
3. Enter the term name (e.g. Fall, Winter Session, etc.). The display name will autofill with the academic year prepended to the name. This is how the term will display in most places in Populi and on student transcripts.
4. Enter start and end dates for the term. Type a date or use the calendar date-picker.
5. Check if this is a non-standard term (see below).
6. Click Add. This lists the term and lets you get to work on additional terms.
7. Repeat these steps as often as you need to. When you're done, click Save.

Step 3: Add closures (optional)

Closures are any days in the academic year on which courses will not meet—Christmas Break, for example. When you add a closure, it will automatically block out course meeting times that would otherwise meet on those dates.

1. Click edit next to Closures.
2. Enter the closure's name (e.g. Spring Break, Thanksgiving, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, etc.
3. Enter start and end dates for the closure. Simply type a date or use the calendar date-picker.
4. Repeat these steps as often as you need to. When you're done, click Save.