Semester Management

Semester Dates

A semester requires the following five dates:

• Registration start: on this day and forward, people can start registering classes
• Early registration end: payment received on or prior to this day will enjoy early registration discount
• First day of school: the first day of school
• Last day to drop class: class dropped after this date will not receive a refund
• Last day of school: last day of school

States

A semester has three states:

• PLANNING
• OPEN
• CLOSED

A semester is at the PLANNING state when administrators are setting up a new semester and courses. At this stage, the semester and its offered courses are only viewable to the staff who has the appropriate authority.

When a semester is at the _OPEN state, it is open to the public.

Please note, an OPEN semester still respects its date. That means even if a semester is OPEN, user will still not be able to register if it is before the registration start. However, user should be able to see all of course offering and semester calendars.

Once a semester is CLOSED, no more activities, such as payment entries, etc. can be conducted on that semester.

An OPEN semester that has passed its last day of school will not be visible to the public. However, it is still visible to the administrator so to allow administrators to enter the appropriate entries before it is CLOSED.

Requirement to close a semester

Once a semester is CLOSED, it remains in that state and can no longer be changed. State change from PLANNING and OPEN can be performed freely.

The CLOSED state is designed from a financial standpoint. As it is very unlikely that our book is balanced, i.e., all the enrollment and other fees have been paid for every student, we need a way to calculate the balances. In theory, it is possible that we can calculate every time we want to build a billing statement. However, that solution is certainly not scalable.

Instead, what we do is, once every payment and fees are finalized, we calculate a balance of each student and record the sum on the new semester. And then no data will be changed for the CLOSED semester.

To close a semester, therefore, requires a target semester. And obviously, the target semester must not be CLOSED.

A semester can close on itself. That is the semester has never received balance transfer from another semester nor has it be CLOSED. This might be useful should the need of an independent semester exists.

Of course, it is possible to have more than one line of semesters. The system does not prohibit you from doing it.