Tracking Down Student Records after Permanently Storing Grades Improperly (PowerSchool)

In June, 2017, we stored grades for our secondary students, neglecting to exclude enrollments that were not active at the time. This means that if any student dropped a course for any reason and had received a grade in the grade book, that course would show up on a transcript with the grade that was current as of the drop date. We didn’t catch the error until the following October. So, we had to track down every high school enrollment that had been unenrolled, pretty much from the first week of second semester. Then we needed to check to see if there was a permanent grade stored for that enrollment and, if so, delete it from the database.

The hardest part was figuring out how to find the students in DDE. This is how we did it:

  1. In the CC table, select all records.
  2. SchoolID = 300 (Our High School)
  3. DateLeft < 06/01/2017  (The end of the semester was 06/07/2017)
  4. DateLeft > 01/10/2017   (The end of the first week of the semester)
  5. Course_Number < 898 (We have dozens of “Club” courses numbered 898-995)
    1. This whole process needs to be repeated to also select course Numbers > 999 to catch the rest of the non-club courses.
  6. *** Switch to the Students table ***
  7. Grade Level >= 9 (Get current HS Freshmen and above)
  8. Grade Level <=12 (Restrict to Seniors and below – exclude Graduates)
  9. Enroll_Status = 0 (Current students only)
  10. Match selection with CC table

Once we had this info, we ran transcript reports for the 35 or so students and checked to see if grades were showing up for dropped courses. Luckily, there were only a few for underclassmen that needed correcting and none of any significant consequence.

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