Understanding Academic Calendars

Academic calendars are systems by which you define the landmark dates that drive much of the day-to-day business at the academic institution. Each academic calendar contains cancel, withdrawal, and drop deadlines along with other landmark dates that vary, depending on the academic calendar type. As you define academic calendars, it is important to consider how the dates in these calendars affect all of the business processes (such as class enrollment, tuition refunds, and statistical reporting). All applications in Campus Solutions use the academic calendar dates in many of their business processes.

Campus Solutions enables you to create two types of academic calendars. The type that you create depends on the academic structure and business needs of the academic institution. For a traditional approach, you can create academic calendars with static landmark dates based on the term and session structure. For a flexible approach, you can create academic calendars with which you dynamically calculate landmark dates for individual classes or students.

A traditional academic calendar is based solely on term and session structure. For each academic career at the academic institution, you must define at least one academic calendar. Thus, you can potentially have as many academic calendars as you have academic careers. For each academic calendar, you must define the cancel, withdrawal, and drop deadlines for each session within each term of an academic career. Because each academic career within an academic institution has its own academic calendar, you can define different landmark dates for each academic career. To associate a traditional academic calendar with a student, you must activate the student into a term within the student's academic career, which in turn ties the appropriate academic calendar to the student. Thus, the dates on the academic calendar for that academic career and term combination drive the student's academic program. Academic calendars are a prerequisite to term activation. You use the Academic Calendar component to define traditional academic calendars, based on the term and session structure.