Academic settings let you establish your preferences for how Populi organizes, calculates, uses, and presents academic information. These settings are foundational to most of what you'll be setting up later—programs, courses, degrees, and so on. If you have a good grasp of how your school's setup will work with Populi, you can go ahead and work through all the settings in one go. But if you need to take it slower, that works, too. You can come back at any time to fill in or update these settings.
In order to update academic settings, you must have the Academic Admin role.
If we imported your legacy academic data, then we imported your Academic Years and have most likely filled in some of your settings (including your grade scales). If we did not import any legacy data, then all of your academic settings are currently set to their default mode. At minimum, you should review them.
First things first: Term Types and Academic Years!
The first thing you need to do is set up Term Types and Academic Years. Term Types are templates that define how academic terms are created, and it's best to set those up before you add academic years. Academic years help organize almost all of your school's information—including academics, admissions, student billing, and some portions of financial aid. They are foundational to nearly everything else you're going to do in Populi. When you create a new academic year, Populi uses your active Term Types to automatically generate the terms for that year.
You can tackle the other academic settings in any order after these two steps.
Does your school use Federal financial aid? We recommend aligning the start and end dates of your academic years and term types with those of the Federal "aid year", which goes from July 1 of one calendar year to June 30 of the next calendar year. Check with your financial aid office to make sure y'all are all on the same page.
Step 1: Set up Term Types
Before adding academic years, you ought to create Term Types, which let you create templates for the academic terms you use during the course of a typical year. (To be clear, these are optional.)
Start by going to Academics > Settings > Term Types.
Step 2: Create Academic Years
Once your Term Types are in place, create the academic years in which those terms will exist. When you create an academic year, Populi automatically generates terms from each active Term Type.
Start by going to Academics > Settings > Academic Years.
Grades & Attendance
The Grades & Attendance settings let you establish letter grade scales, pass/fail grade scales, and various attendance requirements. If you need to change these items for particular academic programs, you can do so later when you set up programs.
Populi provides a basic grade scale (A, B, C, D, F). Feel free to modify this one to your needs. The pass/fail and attendance settings are all optional.
Start by going to Academics > Settings > Grades & Attendance.
General academic settings
General academic settings cover numerous details that will affect the daily operations of your school—global retake policy settings, certain transcript details, and more. You have plenty of latitude about when you take care of your general academic settings, but you should at least look over your options as you consider what your school will need.
Start by going to Academics > Settings > General Settings.
Departments, Honors, and Course Delivery Methods
- Departments help organize your degrees and courses. There's no need to overthink them—other than helping you relate courses and degrees in groups, they don't materially affect much.
- Honors are academic awards (e.g. Dean's List, Summa Cum Laude, etc.) that you can attach to students manually or via automated GPA triggers.
- Course Delivery Methods let you specify how courses are brought to students. Typical examples include On Campus, Online, Self-paced, and so on. You can set up fees to automatically trigger based on a student's enrollment in a course with a particular delivery method. Read about using course delivery methods with student types in this article.
- Although Populi includes the official IPEDS Exit Reasons, should you need to add custom exit reasons for your own internal reporting, you can do that in Academics > Settings. To add a new exit reason, you'll need to map it to one of the official IPEDS reasons.
Start setting up these items by going to Academics > Settings and choosing the appropriate navigation view.
Custom Student Fields
Custom student fields come in two flavors. Student Fields are stored in the student information panel in Profile > Student; they're meant for information that doesn't change that often. Term Student Fields are stored in Profile > Student > Term Info. They're meant for custom information that changes with the passage of time.
Start by going to Academics > Settings and choosing the appropriate navigation view.
Discipline Types and Specialization Types
Discipline is recorded on student profiles. Should you need additional types, consult this article for details.
The built-in specializations are based on the types required by IPEDS reporting and typically cover most schools' needs. Should you need additional specialization types, tell us what it should be called and how it should be reported according to the IPEDS specialization types—if you need a refresher on what those are, just look at the list of built-ins.
Next: set up your academic programs...
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