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Fix course assignment files at the end of the academic year

This article applies to Illinois schools that cannot close the academic year in the ISBE’s IWAS due to an error indicating that a certain number of students are missing grades.

There are two most common reasons for this:

  1. You have not submitted end of year data to the ISBE before closing the academic year in the IWAS. Read more about sending end of year data to the ISBE in order to correct this.
  2. You did submit the end of year data, but earlier submissions of the course assignment files have invalid data. Read fixing course assignment files in order to correct this.

Sending end of year data to the ISBE

At the end of the academic year, the district needs to submit several files in the order described below. You are required to submit other files (Student Attendance, Student Discipline Groups, Early Childhood V3, etc), but we are only listing these files that prevented districts from closing the academic year in the IWAS in the past.

End of year files that should be submitted to the ISBE are:

  1. Student Demographics/Enrollment
    • Send this file to inform the ISBE about any students that joined the district during the academic year. This will create student enrollments for them in the current academic year.
  2. Teacher Course Assignment Entry
    • This file informs the ISBE about teachers and the classes they taught during the academic year.
  3. Student Course Assignment files
    • This is a family of files that inform the ISBE which classes each student takes and about the terms (grading periods) for each class. Additionally, after the last day of the last grading period, these files include class exit dates and student grades that have been entered in the report card. Without an exit date and a grade you cannot exit the student’s enrollment in the IWAS.
    • Depending on the student grade levels you will need to send some or all of the following files
      1. Student Course Assignment V2
      2. Preschool Student Course Assignment
      3. College Course Assignment
  4. Teacher Course Assignment Exit
    • This file informs the ISBE about teacher class exit dates and reasons for the exit.
  5. Exit Student Enrollment
    • This file informs the ISBE if students were promoted or retained at the end of the academic year. It is also the file that will exit students from the academic year in the IWAS. It should be the last file you submit to the ISBE.

Fix course assignment files

Some districts submit the files to the ISBE in the correct order at the end of the academic year, but receive an error that grades and exit information is missing. This happens when report card grading period structure changes during the academic year, because this structure determines the terms submitted in the course assignment files. More, if the district submits course assignment files before and after the change, then extra data may be awaiting to be closed out from the earlier submissions.

Consider the following example:

  • The report card has four quarters (Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4) at the beginning of the year.
  • If you submit the course assignment file, it will have four rows for the class with the term set to Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 respectively.
    • At this point the IWAS will expect 4 rows of data for each teacher and student to be closed at the end of the year.
  • The school decides to add a Final grade on the report card.
  • Your submissions of the course assignment files will now include a single row for the class with the term set to Y1 (yearly class).
  • You cannot close the academic year in IWAS, because the IWAS demands grades and exit information for the incorrect quarterly rows of data.

After consulting with the ISBE, we built a functionality that allows SchoolInsight to identify such invalid rows of data and generate a file that you can upload to the ISBE in order to mark them as erroneous entries.

The overall process to fix course assignment files is as follows:

  1. Obtain the following course assignment files from ISBE
    • Student Course Assignment V2
    • Preschool Student Course Assignment
    • College Course Assignment
    • Teacher Course Assignment Exit
  2. Process each file in SchoolInsight to obtain a fix file
  3. Upload the fix file to ISBE
  4. Close the academic year in IWAS

The following sections will provide instructions about each step of this process.

Obtaining files from the ISBE

It is critical that you do not open the ISBE files in MS Excel after you download it. Doing so will break data formatting and yield unpredictable results.

Use the method described below to obtain the following files from the IWAS:

  1. Student Course Assignment V2
  2. Preschool Student Course Assignment
  3. College Course Assignment
  4. Teacher Course Assignment Exit

To request an ISBE File on the IWAS:

  1. Login to the IWAS portal
  2. Go to Batch Files > Request File
  3. Select the file(s) and request them

This process will take a few minutes, and you will receive a notification when the files are ready.

To download the requested files:

  1. Login to the IWAS portal
  2. Go to Batch Files > Upload/Download Files
  3. Click download next to the file(s)
  4. Save the file(s) on your computer

ISBE files have specific data formats. If you view, edit, and save the file, then the data formatting will be lost and processing a broken file may yield unintended consequences.

Fixing course assignment files in SchoolInsight

After you obtain a file from the IWAS you can process it in SchoolInsight to obtain a new file that will fix incorrect rows. The new file will be formatted 

Use the method described below to obtain a fix file for each of the following files:

  1. Student Course Assignment V2
  2. Preschool Student Course Assignment
  3. College Course Assignment
  4. Teacher Course Assignment Exit

Follow these steps to fix a course assignment file in SchoolInsight:

  1. Go to School District Admin Main > Import/Export > ISBE Files > Fix Invalid Course Assignment Files
  2. Upload the file you obtained from the IWAS
  3. (Optional) Check the checkbox include records in file that do no need corrected
    • This option is suggested for advanced admins that would like to make further edits to the resulting file
    • The resulting file will include correct rows of data in addition to the rows that will be marked as erroneous rows
  4. Preview
  5. The preview screen will display all rows in the resulting file
    • The first column will indicate rows that will have data fixed
    • For these rows, the data that is changing will be marked in red
  6. Download and save the file on your computer

The resulting file will be formatted according to the file’s ISBE requirements. Please do not open and save this file in MS Excel, because this will break the data formats and may yield unexpected results.

Upload the fix files to the IWAS

Each fixed course assignment file you obtain from SchoolInsight needs to be uploaded manually to the IWAS in order to update the erroneous rows of data. After the IWAS processes the data, it will generate a response file that you can process through SchoolInsight to read the result codes easily.

To upload the fix file you received from SchoolInsight to the IWAS:

  1. Login to the IWAS portal
  2. Go to Batch Files > Upload/Download File
  3. Upload each file individually

Immediately, the IWAS will queue your files with files received from other districts and start processing data from each file. This process will take a few minutes, and you will receive a notification when the data has been processed and response files are ready.

To download the response files:

  1. Login to the IWAS portal
  2. Go to Batch Files > Upload/Download Files
  3. Click download next to each file that you have uploaded in the earlier step
  4. Save the file(s) on your computer

We recommend that you verify these files in SchoolInsight in order to check the IWAS’s response to each data row:

  1. Go to School District Admin Main > Import/Export > ISBE Files > Verify ISBE File
  2. Select the corresponding file type and upload the file
  3. Verify
  4. This page should show every row of data you have submitted earlier and the response generated by the IWAS after processing this data.

Close the academic year in IWAS

After this process is completed, you may have to make a few changes manually in the IWAS for a few students, teachers, or classes. Once this is done, you can proceed with finalizing the year in the IWAS.