We have core courses and general requirement courses. The general requirements can be taken anytime as long as it's completed before graduation. The core courses have a designated order and sequence. A student's standing (1st year, 2nd year, etc.) is dependent on what courses they have completed in the sequence.
With the way standings are set in Populi, we can only designate a specific total hours or credits earned to reach a specific standing. However, since the general requirements can be taken anytime, the earned hours for these courses get factor in to the standing calculation and can give a student a higher standing than he or she actually has. For example, 2nd year must have completed 30 hours of the core curriculum. However, if they took 10 hours of general requirements and 20 hours of core courses, they would have the "30 hours" needed to be a 2nd year according to Populi but in reality, they're still a 1st year.
If having standings be based on a select number of courses is difficult to implement, could we have standings be dictated by earning ONE course? For example, we have one course which all 1st years have to PASS in order to move on to 2nd year. If a standing could be based on whether they pass this one course, this would be greatly useful for our school.
One reason why having the correct standings is important is because we use the standing tag as listservs to email those set of students. Therefore, having students labelled with the correct standing is critical to our communication.
Thanks for the consideration!
