Current courses are the courses that students are currently enrolled in. These are courses for which we do not yet have grades or earned credits. We need to know what students are currently taking to estimate the credit they’ll earn (we assume they’ll pass!) and count that towards their graduation requirements.

Historical courses are courses that students have taken in the past. This might be in a previous year or a previous semester. For historical courses, we load data indicating the number of credits the student actually earned and the grade they achieved. This lets us determine if these courses actually fulfilled graduation requirements.

Combined Data Format: Send current and historical courses in a single combined file, refer to the following data schema:

Separate Data Formats: Send current and historical courses separately, refer to these two data formats:

Send us transfer courses. If students have courses on their transcript that don’t exist in your course master, that’s fine! We can handle that, and we want to ensure these courses count toward graduation requirements. (We’ll set that up later during implementation).

Be cautious with manual edits to the file. Try to avoid opening the file in a spreadsheet editor to make changes. This can often lead to incorrectly formatted data.

Watch for ‘leading zeros’ in course IDs. Do any of your course IDs start with a zero? If so, be aware that most spreadsheet editors remove the leading zero if you open and edit the file. This can lead to incorrect course IDs or duplicated courses.

Include middle school courses for high school planning if applicable. If what students take in middle school can impact what courses they can take (or need to take) in high school, include those courses! We can use these to fulfill graduation requirements or satisfy prerequisites.

Let us know if what students plan is different from what gets scheduled. For example, if students plan a year-long course, but you break it into two semesters for scheduling (and will send us two courses in the current/historical courses file), let us know. SchooLinks can handle it, but this may require some additional configuration.

Upload a Student Plan Schools data file, which tells us which school each student will attend next year.

Create feeder patterns using a Feeder Pattern file, which automatically sets next year’s school based on a student’s current school.

Student Plan Schools Schema

Feeder Pattern Schema

You can use both a plan schools file and feeder patterns; however, the data in the Student Plan Schools file will take precedence, and Feeder Patterns can fill in any gaps in the data.

You can send a partial list of planned schools in the Student Plan Schools file to make small updates.

Be cautious about making manual changes to planned schools within SchooLinks because it will not be updated by changes we receive from the plan schools file or a feeder pattern.