This may have already been discussed in a previous post or solved in the most latest version as I am still running v13.0.02.
I am set up as a teacher but with administrator rights. Not perfect but when testing a new system and trying to muddle my way through a steep learning curve off the back of a Category 5 hurricane with no Internet access in school or at home for eight weeks, you try to make things easier.
I came across a problem when updating attendance for one of my class groups ICT08.1 who have lessons on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and instead entered attendance for a non-timetabled day - 26th. I also noticed that attendance had been entered for ICT09.2 on Monday when school was closed. Unfortunately, the system has accepted the data on both counts, and I cannot find a way to remove the entries, only to amend them. Note, that I have not tried to add a non-active code to the settings or to delete any entry from PHP tables.
Has this problem arisen before and how was it solved, or has this issue been addressed and patched in the new version?
Currently there aren’t tools to delete attendance logs through Gibbon. I believe the idea is to ensure data is amended rather than removed, however much like in your case accidents can happen (perhaps its something that can be developed). In the next version (v15, releasing Jan 2018) there’s an added notification at the top to warn teachers if the class isn’t scheduled for that day, which should help in the future.
At this point editing via the database is likely your best bet. If you’d like some instructions for doing that let me know.
Generally the system prevents taking attendance on a day the school is closed (if it’s set through Manage Special Days in School Admin). I wonder, if the school was closed on that Monday, perhaps it was set after attendance was taken for that day?
As you rightly said, the system should have safeguards to stop erroneous attendance entries and I wonder if this would have happened for a teacher’s account without administrator permissions. Nevertheless, I think it is an important point to resolve if schools are required to give accurate attendance figures to education agencies or draw upon data for their own customised reporting. At present, we produce termly paper reports that have absences, lates, merits and detentions, but a move towards automating this process would require some data to be extracted from the system.
In the case of ICT09.1, I had a thought similar to your last point. I removed the timetabled day that was tied to the date but not set it to a closed day because of our hurricane status; doing so did remove the attendance data.
Yet, the problem with ICT08.1 still exists. PHP here we go.
I have now removed entries from two PHP tables - GibbonAttendanceLogPerson and GibbonAttendanceLogCourseClass - although with hindsight, it seems that the latter table confirms attendance taken and converts the colour coded block from red to green and that entries in the first table are by default present and pending.
