Today we are going to take a look at the differences between Current Term GPA/Honor Roll report vs the Historical GPA/Rank and Current/Active GPA/Rank reports.

Current Term GPA/Honor Roll

The Current Term GPA/Honor Roll report pulls data from the eligible table. This data is calculated from sturcd and is based off currently scheduled classes for a student. This data written to the eligible table is created when selecting the option to Calculate Current GPA/Eligibility within Marks Processing. This report can be used to determine, as of today, which students are potentially eligible or not to participate in extra-curricular activities based off marks received for current classes.

Current/Active GPA/Rank

The Current/Active GPA/Rank report returns data that has been written to the table gpahist and returns a list of historical GPAs and ranks that have been calculated for students based off transcript records. This report can be used to gather a list of students who are enrolled as of a given date, and have the top GPA and rank for a specific GPA type. This can help determine things such as valedictorian, or top x amount of students in a class based off GPA.

Historical GPA/Rank

The Historical GPA/Rank report also pulls from gpahist. This data comes from what has been posted as transcript records for students. This data is created when selecting to Calculate GPA&Rank within Marks Processing, when calculating GPAs within Student Academic History > GPA History tab, or when using the Calculate GPA application. This report returns this data for a selected term and gpa type, and looks strictly at the table gpahist and gives information for the selected term as well as cumulative data.

It is very important to remember you cannot compare results pulled from eligible table (current termGPA/Honor Roll report) vs data pulled from gpahist (Historical GPA/Rank and Current/Active GPA/Rank reports)!

It is also important to remember the information stored in the eligible table can potentially change if a student receives a change in a mark for a class they are currently scheduled in. For example, a user can run the Current GPA report, and a student shows as having a 3.8 GPA. Then someone goes in and alters a mark for one of the student’s classes. If the mark is changed significantly (for example from a B to D) and a user were to go back in and re-run the Current Term GPA report, the GPA calculated on the report will now reflect based off the new mark of D entered in sturcd for this student, so the results would most likely differ than the first run of the report.