Attendance Categories

To set up attendance categories for your school in Academics, go to Attendance to open the Attendance Hub. You should see an Attendance categories link under Settings.

When you set up attendance for your school, you decide which types of absences and tardies faculty members can choose from in attendance menus. You can also create a virtual attendance category to mark students present for distance-learning or hybrid courses.

Start by adding Categories, then add Reasons within those categories.

To change which users have the ability to take attendance, see Roles in Core. To change which users have the ability to view attendance for a student or class, see Attendance display in Academics.

  1. Select + Add Category. This opens the Add Attendance Category dialog.

  2. Enter a name under Category.

    Common Category names include Absent Excused, Absent Unexcused, Tardy Excused, and Tardy Unexcused.

  3. Set the category to Active if you would like to make it available right away. Set it to Inactive if you plan to spend some more time setting it up before releasing it.

  4. Add some reasons under Attendance Reason(s). Use the following fields:

    • Sort: Determines the order in which reasons will appear in menus. Smaller numbers appear higher on menus.

    • Reason: This will appear as an option for faculty to select underneath the Category.

      Common Reason names include Tardy With Excuse, College Visit, Doctor's Appointment, and Attended Virtually.

    • Status: Choose Active or Inactive to determine whether this Reason will be available for employees taking attendance.

    • Faculty Access: Determines whether faculty members will be able to choose this Reason. You may choose to leave some Reasons only available to administrators.

    • Type: Choose Absence, Tardy, or Virtual.

      The Virtual attendance type is separate from the Present attendance type, but it functions in a similar way. When you select Virtual, the following settings are automatically applied to the Attendance Reason: Excused/Unexcused is set to N/A, Use in calculations is set to No, and Full Day / Half Day is set to N/A. These settings cannot be modified.

    • Excused/Unexcused

    • Use in calculations: Determines whether this field contributes to the Day Equivalency calculation.

    • Full Day / Half Day: This feature is not fully functional yet. Your selection will not affect daily absence counts.

  5. Select + Add Reason as needed to add more Reasons.

  6. When you are finished, select Save & Close.

After setting up a Category, you can return to it and add or modify Reasons as needed.

  • To add a Reason straight from the Attendance categories screen, find the Category and select Add Reason. This adds a new row under the Category that you can edit as needed.

  • To modify a Reason, select the cell you would like to edit and make changes.

    Details on some Categories and Reasons, such as Attended Class, cannot be modified or deleted.

  • To delete a Reason, select the trash can icon on the far right.

  • To open the Edit Attendance Category dialog, select the pencil icon beside a Category.

By default, every school has a single Present attendance type that can apply to any course. If you want to enable teachers to designate that a student attended class virtually, add a new attendance Category and create an attendance Reason with the Type marked Virtual.

Your school might choose to add a new Category (for example, “Virtual”) containing just one Reason (for example, “Attended Virtually”). Optionally, if you would like to add options for marking students absent or tardy from virtual classes, you can add more Reasons to the virtual attendance category and give them relevant names (“Virtual - Absent,” “Virtual - Tardy,” etc.).

Virtual absences and virtual tardies are not their own attendance Types, so you will use the regular Absence and Tardy Types to create these Reasons.

  1. Select + Add Category to open the Add Attendance Category dialog.

  2. Under Category, enter a name (for example, "Virtual").

  3. Set the Status to Active if you would like to make this category available immediately.

  4. Under Attendance Reason(s), enter a name (for example, "Attended Virtually"). This is the menu option that employees will see when they take attendance.

  5. Set Faculty Access to Yes if you would like to make a Reason available for teachers to select when taking attendance.

  6. Set the Type to Virtual.

    When you select Virtual, the following settings are automatically applied to the Attendance Reason: Excused/Unexcused is set to N/A, Use in calculations is set to No, and Full Day / Half Day is set to N/A. These settings cannot be modified.

  7. Select Save & Close.

Once your school has recorded attendance using a Virtual attendance type, you can generate a list of students attending virtually by using filters on the Class attendance list or Day attendance list. See the help topic Attendance Lists for more information.

To rearrange the order of Categories, select Edit Order. Click and drag Categories to their desired positions, or select ^ Top to move a category to the top of the list. When you are finished, select Save & Close.