Beyond the School Year

How Your Institution Will Be Organized in iGradePlus 12: School Systems, Campuses, Schools, and Cohorts covered the shape of your institution. This post covers the other half of the model: how time will be structured within it.

In version 12, the School Year feature will be replaced by something broader: Timelines. A school year will still be a Timeline — and for most schools it will be the only one they ever create — but it will no longer be the only way to describe an academic calendar.

How it works today

If you’ve set up a school year in iGradePlus, the shape of it is familiar: one school year, active across the account, four grading periods by default, and a “start new school year” step you run each summer to carry your setup forward into the next one.

That model has served the great majority of schools well, and for a single school on a traditional calendar it still does. What it assumes is that a school year is the only unit of time that matters, and that every school in the account runs on one. For institutions that have grown into multiple locations, or that run programs outside the traditional calendar, that assumption has become a constraint.

Here is where today’s School Year feature reaches its limits.

One active year for the whole account. iGradePlus allows exactly one school year with an “Active” status across your entire subscription. Grading periods within that year can be configured per school — a multi-school system can give each of its schools its own set of periods — but the year itself is shared: its name, its status, and its overall span apply everywhere. A school that needs a different academic year altogether, or an institution that needs to run two calendars side by side, has no way to describe that.

Grading period locking isn’t available. Once a quarter ends, there is no way to close it — scores and assignments can still be added to it, and nothing distinguishes a finished period from an open one. Administrators have asked for this repeatedly; one of the direct requests behind this work was simply: “How can I stop teachers and admins adding scores or creating assignments when a quarter is over?”

Rollover is a single all-or-nothing operation. Starting a new year copies your grade scales, class periods, categories, classes, weights, and schedules across the whole subscription at once. It gets a new year up and running quickly, but it is one action with one behavior — no selective copy, no per-school control, no preview before it runs.

None of these are defects. They are the natural consequences of a design built when “one school, one year, four quarters” described nearly every customer — and for a great many schools, it still does.

What will change in iGradePlus 12

Version 12 will replace the School Year feature with Timelines. A Timeline will be the temporal backbone of your school — the thing that says when the academic year runs, how it’s divided into grading periods, and how those periods add up into a course grade.

The important change: a Timeline will no longer always be a school year. There will be three kinds, and you’ll pick the one that matches how your program actually runs.

Timeline
    ├── School Year       ← a traditional year, divided into grading periods
    ├── Academic Term     ← a single standalone term, with its own enrollment window  (NEW)
    └── Cohort Timeline   ← an independent calendar for a continuous-enrollment group  (NEW)

A Timeline will be something you create and manage in its own right, rather than a single account-wide setting — which means more than one will be able to be active at the same time, and they won’t all have to be the same kind. How you apply them across your schools is covered further down.

The three kinds of Timeline

School Year

The traditional K–12 model, and what most schools will use. A named year with start and end dates and multiple grading periods — up to 16. If your school runs August to June with four quarters plus a semester and final summary, this is you, and it will feel familiar.

Academic Term (new)

A single term — a semester, a quarter, a summer session — that stands on its own. It will carry its own name, code, and its own enrollment window, including whether late enrollment is permitted and when enrollment opens and closes. Its start and end dates won’t be entered separately; they will come from its grading period, so the term and its grading always agree.

This is genuinely new. Today a “semester” isn’t something you create; it is a label that appears automatically when you set your grading period count to 2. It has no enrollment dates of its own, it can’t be run independently, and two can’t run side by side. In version 12, all three will be possible.

Cohort Timeline (new)

The calendar a Cohort runs on. A Cohort is the group of students who start together and finish together; the Cohort Timeline is the schedule that group moves through — March to November, say, on its own dates, with its own grading periods (up to 16). Career and technical programs, adult education, certificate tracks, and rolling-intake programs have been fitting themselves awkwardly into a K–12 school year for years. They will no longer have to.

Applying Timelines across your schools

How a Timeline reaches your schools — and the cohorts within them — will be a choice you make rather than a fixed rule. There will be three ways to set it up, and the first two will work the way iGradePlus works today.

One Timeline for every school

A single Timeline applies to every school in the system. Each school runs the same dates and the same grading periods, and there is one Timeline to manage. This is how iGradePlus works today, and for an institution whose schools all follow the same calendar it will remain the simplest arrangement.

One Timeline for every school, with grading periods set per school

A single School Year still applies to every school, but each school defines its own grading periods within it. The year itself — its name, its span — is shared, so there is still only one to manage; the divisions inside it can differ from one school to the next. This is available today as well, and it will carry forward.

Multiple active Timelines, each assigned to particular schools and/or cohorts (new)

More than one Timeline will be able to be active at the same time, assigned wherever it actually applies — to a specific school or group of schools, or, one level further down, to a specific Cohort within a school.

Across schools, that means your elementary schools can be on one School Year while your early college program runs on Academic Terms and your CTE center runs on its own calendar entirely. Within a school, it means each Cohort can carry its own Cohort Timeline: the group that starts in March and finishes in November isn’t bound to the calendar the rest of the school runs on, and a second cohort starting in September can run alongside it. Each Timeline keeps its own dates, its own grading periods, and its own lifecycle.

This is the arrangement that today’s single-active-year model has no way to describe, and it is what makes the three Timeline types genuinely usable side by side. When you change how Timelines are applied, iGradePlus will explain the consequences before you commit — for instance, that moving to per-school assignment means each school will need a Timeline of its own.

The first two options keep the administrative simplicity of a single calendar for the institutions that want it. The third exists for institutions whose schools — or whose cohorts within a school — really do run on different calendars, so they no longer have to choose between one shared calendar and managing separate systems.

A real lifecycle

Every Timeline will move through explicit states: Planned → Active → Closed → Archived.

Each state will mean something specific:

• Planned — created but not yet in use. Dates, grading periods, and settings can be worked out freely, and nothing is scheduled or graded against it. This is where a timeline sits while you build it.
• Active — in use. This is the timeline the school is currently running: classes, assignments, attendance, and grading all happen against it.
• Closed — its run has ended. Its grading periods are locked, and for a School Year the year itself is locked, so scores and assignments can no longer be changed without an audited override.
• Archived — moved out of everyday use. It remains fully available for transcripts, historical grades, and reports, but disappears from the lists your staff pick from every day.

Moving between them will be a deliberate action rather than a flag you flip. Activating will check your dates and grading period definitions, and warn you about conflicts with other active timelines, before it lets you go live. Closing will cascade to the grading periods beneath it rather than leaving them open.

Today a school year is either Active or Archived, and a year is archived as part of starting the next one. Version 12 will make each step in that progression something you choose, with the system checking your work before it takes effect.

Grading period locking 

This is the change most administrators will feel first. When a grading period is locked, iGradePlus will refuse the writes that shouldn’t happen after a quarter closes:

• No creating assignments in the locked period
• No editing assignments in the locked period
• No deleting graded assignments
• No changing scores, statuses, dates, or comments
• No overriding grades
• No altering grade weights or drop-score policies

You’ll be able to lock periods manually, set a date for them to lock automatically, unlock a period when you need to, and unlock specific classes within a locked period when one teacher legitimately needs to finish up. Administrators and customer support will retain an override for genuine emergencies — and every override will be recorded in the audit log.

School Years will get the same treatment at the year level: once a year ends, it will lock, and further changes will require an explicit, audited override.

Grading periods that can move safely

Grading period dates change. A break gets extended, a quarter shifts by a week, and assignments can end up counted in the wrong period.

Two things will change here:

Smarter reassignment. When you change a grading period’s dates, iGradePlus will move only the assignments in the affected window — the range covered by the old dates or the new ones — into their correct period, instead of reviewing every assignment in the year.

Mismatch detection and teacher notification. When a period change leaves assignments stranded outside the period they were graded in, the system will identify them, notify the affected teachers, and give you a review page listing exactly what needs attention — rather than leaving it to be spotted during a grade review.

The Timeline Planner

Today, preparing for a new year is something you do to the live system, one year at a time, shortly before you need it. Version 12 will introduce the Timeline Planner — a dedicated workspace for building timelines, in advance and more than one at a time. It is where most of the setup work in version 12 will actually happen.

Plan years ahead, not just the next one. The Planner will let you build out several school years in advance rather than only the one in front of you. A year you are planning stays in the Planned state, fully editable, with nothing scheduled or graded against it until you activate it.

Bring your classes with you. Classes will be able to be copied forward from the previous timeline rather than rebuilt, and you will choose how much comes with them — their assignments, their curriculum, and their rosters.

Set up the whole year, not just its dates. Alongside the start and end dates of each grading period, the Planner will carry the configuration that a year actually needs to run — class periods, grade scales, assessment options, attendance options, and behavior options. The scheduling work will happen there too: defining your class schedules and assigning students to their classes for a year that hasn’t started yet. Promoting students up a grade level will be part of the same work rather than a separate chore afterwards, and students enrolled into a year that hasn’t started will carry a planned status, so it is clear who is registered for a year that isn’t running. A planned year arrives ready to teach rather than as an empty shell you have to furnish once it begins.

For a district, the Planner will do all of this across every school at once rather than school by school — including starting the new year for every school in the system in a single action.

What will stay the same

Your grade math will not change. The six ways a set of grading periods can roll up into a summary grade will carry forward exactly as they are today:

Method	How the summary is calculated
Average	The mean average of the included grading period grades
Cumulative	Total points earned across the periods ÷ total points possible
GP Weighted	Cumulative, with each grading period weighted by an amount you set
Class-Defined	Each class chooses its own method on its grading options page (default: Average)
Quality Points	Quality-point arithmetic, with configurable precision, rounding mode, and a no-rounding threshold
Category Weighted	Cumulative across per-category grades, with each category weighted per period

Per-class weight overrides, per-category weights within a period, and quality-point precision and rounding settings will all carry forward. If you’ve spent time getting your semester and final grade calculations exactly right, that work follows you.

Grading period summaries themselves will work the way you expect — a named span across a range of periods (“Semester 1”, “Final”) that produces its own grade.

Side by side

	School Years today	Timelines in iGradePlus 12
Unit of time	School year only	School Year, Academic Term, or Cohort Timeline
Concurrent timelines	One active year per subscription	Multiple, including different types at once
Scope	One shared year per subscription; grading periods configurable per school	The same two arrangements, plus multiple active Timelines assigned to particular schools and/or cohorts
Timeline dates	Implied by the grading periods; the year has no span of its own	Derived from the grading periods by design — one source of truth, no drift
Lifecycle	Active or Archived	Planned → Active → Closed → Archived
Period locking	Not available	Enforced across assignments, scores, overrides, weights, and drop policies
Year locking	None	Auto-lock on year end, with audited override
Grading period limit	16 per year	Per type: 16 (School Year), 16 (Cohort Timeline), 1 (Academic Term)
Enrollment windows	None	Built into Academic Term

What this will mean for you

• If you run a single school on a traditional calendar, your setup will work the way it does now: create a School Year, define your periods, and go. What you’ll gain is grading-period locking, a lifecycle you control, and a rollover you can steer.
• If you run multiple schools, how Timelines are applied across them is the headline. Keep the single shared calendar you manage today, vary the grading periods school by school, or run genuinely separate Timelines where your schools genuinely differ.
• If you run non-traditional programs, Academic Terms and Cohort Timelines are for you. Your program’s calendar will finally be describable as what it is, instead of being bent into the shape of a K–12 year.