Locked Timelines and Grading Periods

Applies to both the Enterprise SIS and the free gradebook.

One of the most frequently asked-for things in iGradePlus is also one of the simplest to describe. A teacher put it plainly: “How can I stop teachers and admins adding scores or creating the assignments when a quarter is over?”

In version 12, you will be able to. A grading period and the Timeline that contains it will each be something you can close — and closing one will mean iGradePlus refuses the changes that shouldn’t happen afterwards, rather than trusting everyone to remember.

Grading periods belong to Timelines — a school year, an academic term, or a cohort’s own calendar — covered in Beyond the School Year. This post is about what will happen when a piece of that structure is closed.

How it works today

Grading in iGradePlus is open by default, and stays open. That is deliberate: a teacher who spots a mistake in March can fix a January score without asking anyone, and a grade entered wrong is never stuck.

Here is where that reaches its limits.

A grading period never closes. When a quarter ends, nothing changes about it. Assignments can still be created in it, scores can still be entered and changed, and there is nothing to distinguish a finished quarter from the one currently running.

A school year stays open until it is archived, and archiving happens as part of starting the next one. Between the last day of the year and that rollover, the year behaves exactly as it did in September.

Neither of these is a defect. They are what a system looks like when it assumes a correction is more likely to be wanted than refused — which, for a single teacher running their own gradebook, is usually right. What version 12 adds is the ability to say when that stops being true.

What will change in iGradePlus 12

Locking will happen at two levels:

Timeline                 ← locks when it ends
    └── Grading Period   ← locks on its own lock date, or when you close it by hand

You will be able to close a quarter while the Timeline around it continues, and the two connect: finishing a Timeline will close the grading periods inside it in one step.

Locking a grading period

This is the change most people will feel first, and it is the one the request above was asking for.

Every grading period will carry a lock date

Alongside its start and end dates, each grading period will have a lock date of its own. Grades can be entered up to the day before it; from that date onward, the period is closed.

Set it a week or two after the period ends and your teachers get a defined grace period to finish up, after which the period closes on its own and nobody has to remember to do it. Leave it empty and the period never closes on a schedule — which is the right setting for a school that would rather close its periods deliberately, by hand.

Summary terms carry a lock date in the same way, so a Semester 1 or a Final can close on its own schedule rather than inheriting one.

Locking and unlocking by hand

The schedule is a default, not a cage. Whatever the lock date says, you will be able to:

• Lock a period early, before its lock date arrives — grading is done, close it now.
• Unlock a period that is closed, whether it closed on schedule or you closed it early.
• Relock a period you reopened, once whatever needed fixing has been fixed.

Reopening a period after its lock date has passed is a supported act rather than a workaround. A grade appeal in March against a quarter that closed in January is an ordinary thing to happen, and it should not require anyone to move the lock date and then remember to move it back.

And where only one class needs longer — a teacher out sick the week grades were due, a section waiting on a make-up exam — that class will be able to be reopened on its own, leaving the period closed for everybody else.

What a locked period refuses

Once a period is locked, iGradePlus will refuse the writes that shouldn’t happen after a quarter is over:

• 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

That last pair matters more than it looks. Weights and drop-score policies change every grade in the class at once, so a period that refused score edits but allowed a weight change would not really be closed.

One further protection comes with locking: once a period is locked, the shape of the timeline is settled too. Its grading periods can no longer be rebuilt — changing how many there are, or the span they cover, after grades have been locked would strand those grades against periods that no longer exist.

Locking a Timeline

A Timeline will lock as a whole, too, and it will happen on its own: when you finish it, or when its end date passes.

This applies to whichever kind of Timeline you are running. A school year locks when the year is over; an academic term locks at the end of the term; a cohort’s calendar locks when that cohort finishes, whatever month that falls in. The rule is the same — when a Timeline’s run is over, it closes.

A locked Timeline will record when it was locked, and attempting to change something inside one will say so plainly — it is closed, here is what that means, here is who can reopen it — instead of the change simply going through.

This is what makes a finished Timeline genuinely finished. Transcripts, class rank, GPA, and report-card history all read from periods that are supposed to be settled; one that quietly stays editable is one whose reports can change underneath you.

When a Timeline finishes, its locks follow

Locking every grading period one at a time at the end of a Timeline would be tedious, and easy to half-finish.

So completing a Timeline will close what belongs to it: its grading periods, and the Timeline itself. One action at the end rather than a checklist — and no quarter left open because somebody missed it.

When a locked period has to change anyway

Unlocking a period reopens it for everyone. Sometimes that is more than the situation calls for: one correction, to one student, in a quarter that should otherwise stay shut — a grade appeal, a transcript error found in August, an incomplete resolved months later.

Administrators will keep an override for exactly those cases, and iGradePlus customer support will retain one for genuine emergencies. Every use of it will be recorded in the audit log — what was changed, by whom, and when — as will every lock, unlock and relock. That is what makes an override safe to have: not that it is hard to use, but that it is never invisible.

In the free gradebook, you are your own administrator. Locking is there to protect you from an accidental edit to a quarter you finished in November, and reopening one is simply a decision you make — there is no one to ask.

What this will mean for you

• If you run a school, the end of a quarter becomes an actual event rather than a date on a calendar that everyone is trusted to respect. Grades stop moving when you say they stop moving, and the exceptions are recorded rather than assumed.
• If you teach, the protection runs the other way too: a period you have finished cannot be disturbed by a late edit, yours or anyone else’s — and the lock date tells you exactly how long you have before a period closes, rather than leaving it to be announced.
• If you teach on the free gradebook, you get the same locks at a size that fits — close a quarter when you are done with it, and stop worrying about knocking something out of place months later.
• If you handle transcripts, GPA, or class rank, the figures you publish will come from years and periods that are closed, so a report you ran in June still says the same thing in December.