Tool Search: Course Rules
A Planning Rule defines relationships between courses across years and for a single year, allowing students to choose courses and to effectively plan their Academic Plan. This information is used when students and counselors are determining an Academic Plan for the student.
Create Planning Rules in future calendars.
Planning rules help ensure that students take courses in appropriate years and in the appropriate order. They are NOT used to place courses on a student schedule during the scheduling process.
Planning Rules Best Practices
When you are using Academic Planning functionality:
- When a year or semester long course is broken down into multiple courses for schedule flexibility, the Parent Of/Child Of rules should be used. Parent and child courses must have the same credit type. Prerequisites for this sort of setup only need to include or be defined on the Parent course.
- Rule alerts prevent a student from requesting a course without meeting the rule requirements from the transcript, in-progress courses or planned courses.
- Courses that require instructor approval need to have the Allow Student Requests checkbox not marked. Instructors use the Student Course Recommendations to recommend these courses.
- Always verify the Calendar/School selection before saving rules.
- Inactivation of courses requires adjustments to Course Planning Rules.
Planning Rules Descriptions
Prerequisite
Course 1 must be completed (or planned) before Course 2
Spanish 1 must come before Spanish 2.
Students must have completed or planned to complete a course in an earlier year before planning the next course in the sequence. The course numbers entered in the Transcript/Course Number(s) field must be completed or planned before the student can take or plan the selected course.
When Parent courses are the prerequisite, enter only the Parent Course number in Transcript/Course Number(s) field and only the Parent Credits in Credits. Entering the sum of the Parent and Child credits triggers an alert message on the Course Plan.
Concurrent
Course A must be taken during the same year as Course B
Chemistry Lecture must be taken during the same year as Chemistry Lab.
All course numbers entered into the Transcript/Course Number field must be taken in a single year.
Prerequisite or Concurrent
Any course in the Transcript/Course Number(s) list must have been taken in a previous year or the same year as the current course.
A school offers Welding 1, Welding 2, Welding 3 and Welding 4 as semester long courses. Welding 1 is taken in the first semester of the school year; Welding 2 is taken in the second semester of the school year or any semester (next year even) following the first semester.
Equivalent
Two courses cover the same content.
When an Equivalent planning rule is saved, any courses entered in the Transcript/Course Number(s) field also have an equivalent rule created.
Algebra 1, Honors, Algebra 1, and CBE Algebra 1 might all have different course codes, but when a student takes one Algebra course, he does not need to take the others.
Parent of
This course is the first part of a multi-term course that has been broken up into multiple courses for schedule flexibility. This rule allows the student to request this course and also receive any child courses.
Foreign language courses are broken into semester-long courses (German 1 Semester 1, German 1 Semester 2, etc.). The German 1 Semester 1 course is assigned the Parent Of rule; the German 1 Semester 2 course is assigned the Child Of rule. German 2 Semester 1 is assigned the Prerequisite rule, with the Course Number and Credits from only the Parent, German 1 Semester 1.
Any other planning rules (Prerequisite, Prerequisite or Concurrent, etc.) must be associated only with the course marked as Parent Of.
Parent and child courses must have the same credit type.
When adding this rule, the Course 2 dropdown field lists all active courses from the student's future enrollment calendar.
Child Of
Parent of/Child of rules associate multi-term courses that have been broken up into individual courses for schedule flexibility. Requesting the parent part gives a student a request for all dependent parts.
Foreign language courses are broken into semester long courses (German 1 Semester 1, German 1 Semester 2, etc.). The German 1 Semester 1 course is assigned the Parent Of rule; the German 1 Semester 2 course is assigned the Child Of rule. German 2 Semester 1 is assigned the Prerequisite rule, with the Course Number and Credits from only the Parent, German 1 Semester 1.
This course is a dependent part of Course 2.
Any other planning rules (Prerequisite, Prerequisite or Concurrent, etc.) must be associated only with the course marked as Parent Of.
When using this rule, verify that no other planning rules are associated with the Child Of courses. Parent/Child course rules create a built-in expectation in the Course Plan that the student takes both the parent and the child course and earn the credits for both courses. The Child course and its credits should not be included in other planning rules.
Parent and child courses must have the same credit type.
Grade Level
Grade Level rule indicates the course can only be planned by students (or parents) when they are in that grade level. Counselors do have the ability to override this.
A Senior Seminar may have the 12th grade added. Only students in the 12th grade can plan this for their senior year. However, a student in the 11th grade may be graduating early and is allowed to participate; in this instance, the counselor would need to add the Senior Seminar to the 11th grade student's Course Plan.
More than one grade level can be added, but do not add all grade levels when assigning this rule.
Course Rotation
This rule is used to mark a course only being available on a rotating basis (i.e., not every year). Enter the interval of years in the Allow Course to be Planned Every __ Years (the value needs to be greater than one), then select the School Year for when the course is first offered.
Astronomy is offered every three years, beginning with the 2018-19 school year. A value of 3 is entered for the Allow Course to Planned field, and the Starting School Year is 2018-19. This means any student can plan this course during the 2018-19 school year, but it won't be offered again until the 2021-2022 school year.
