When submitting the Student Course Assignment (SCA) export to ISBE, the number and type of terms on the class and report card determines how many course assignments are submitted per student to the state. For more details, see What is the relationship between SchoolInsight grading periods and the terms on ISBE course assignments?
Because ISBE only accepts course assignments for which the start date has already passed, courses that have future terms such as Q2, Q3, Q4 that haven’t begun yet may result in the error:
“Student Course Start Date = [Date] should be less than equal to today’s date.”
If the terms are being submitted correctly (i.e. in the above example, you are intentionally submitting individual quarterly grades instead of semester or final grades), then the error can be ignored. There is no problem with the data, but you will need to re-submit the SCA file after the beginning of each grading period.
If you determine that the class terms are not being sent correctly (e.g. you want to send a Final grade instead of individual quarterly grades), then several steps need to be taken. By the time you receive the above error message, ISBE will have likely already accepted some of the initial course assignment data for the wrong term, so those course assignments will need to be deleted.
- Contact ISBE and ask them to wipe your course assignment data
- Create summary grading period
- Add summary grading period to classes
- Add summary grading period to report cards
- Re-submit the Teacher Course Assignment Entry and Student Course Assignment, after using the preview to verify that the correct terms are being submitted