I understand that I have written a lot below, so in case you don't want to read the whole thing, the basic idea is that I think this is an important issue, it is extremely time consuming for us, it is easy to make a mistake, and while the tech I spoke to told me that it would take a "major overhaul of the system" to fix, I believe there are smaller fixes that may be implemented that could at least make it easier for the users, if not fix it altogether. (No 1 fix: put only 100 users on each page! Then you wouldn't have to manually count each student as you check them off, you can use the "check all" button).

OK if you want to read everything else on why I think this is an important issue (which is why I asked my technician, Darrick, to make an Portal Idea for me --even though he added it as a "guest" instead of his employee account.) I asked him to add it after he told me he was closing my ticket because "This case has been evaluated and despite our best efforts, we have not had an opportunity to address it", read on:

I think this is a very important issue to look into. Our school has roughly 1600 students at any given time, and I assume most other Blackbaud users have similar numbers.

Our old SIS software would promote students automatically, except for those the user checked off as "not to be promoted/graduated". This seems like a more logical way of going about things. (ie: more students will pass and be promoted than vice versa). So it would make more sense for the software to automatically promote all students except the ones that are manually removed by the users. Instead ~1600 students have to be manually promoted or graduated, while STILL removing those who are not moving up.)

So just as a clarification, I have to MANUALLY press a "promote" or "graduate" button roughly 1600 times in order to move our rising students up and graduate the rest. AND, I can only do them 100 at a time, and one grade at a time!!

I have spoken to the technicians about this and understand that this would require a large overhaul to the system to implement, but this is like a quality of life issue. This makes me think "why did we switch to Blackbaud, when our old SIS did this almost automatically for us? We moved to Blackbaud because it was supposed to be MORE user friendly, and it is, for the students and parents, but somehow it seems to be (in a lot of areas), LESS user friendly for the teachers, administrators and IT techs who are using the software every day"

So even if it would be a huge overhaul to completely fix the error which makes you have to go back to the beginning if you try to graduate or promote more than 100 users at a time (which by the way, doesn't seem like an expected behavior, as I was told, it seems like an error). So even if you can't do that, is there ANYTHING you can do that wouldn't require such a huge overhaul that would help this act like an expected behavior? Here are some examples:

1) Make only 100 students appear on each promotion/graduation screen. Then when you "check all" you can only check up to 100 students at a time. It would make it 1000x easier to then click "Next" instead of going to page 2. (I think this would be the most helpful out of any ideas I can think of)

2) Make it look more like a table or a modern list, so it is easier to see which radio button belongs to which student (therefore making it easier to select them for lone students)

3) Put in another section like "On Hold". Then I could manually select the students who aren't graduating due to summer school, process them through, and they wouldn't show up again when I restarted to put through the graduating students. I'd still have to count 100 students, but wouldn't have to worry about accidentally putting someone through who shouldn't go, or clicking the wrong radio button.

Regardless of graduating or promoting, having to manually put everyone through in groups of 100 students or less is excessively time consuming. ESPECIALLY the fact that I have to count them MYSELF, since there are no handy notifications letting me know how many students are on each page, how many have been checked for each classification box, and they all have INDIVIDUAL radio buttons that are difficult to see who they belong to because there are no lines under each row to show which student belongs to which radio button.

Also, since we can only do 100 at a time, I can't even use the "Check all" button! I have included a picture to show the tediousness of this. Even if I "Check All" for the "No Change" section, I still have to manually check 100 students in the "Graduate" section. And that is not including any students who are not graduating/being promoted. For those, I have to try to make sure I'm pressing the right radio button for their name (which is very difficult without holding a ruler up to the screen, since there is no underline or indication of which buttons belong to which names, it is not a table, and each column is quite far away from each other). You can see an example of this in the picture I attached, which shows a hypothetical situation in which student Giuliana is not graduating.

I thought of manually doing the "No change" students first (most of our students who do not graduate are only in the situation because they must complete summer school before they can graduate. So we have almost 0 withdrawals and No repeats). However, the "no change" students will STILL be on the list when I try to reload and put through the graduated students!

If any other user has a better way of doing this that I am not seeing, please reply and let me know! So far the "easiest" way I can figure out is this:

1) "Check all" students as "No change"

2) Starting from the top, go down and manually check "Graduate" for all of the graduating students, making sure to count to 100 as I go, so I don't go over and get the error by accident (which makes you have to start the entire process over, by the way).

3) Also, keep "No change" checked for any students who are not currently graduating out of this bunch of 100. Be VERY careful to make sure I am checking the right radio button, as "no change" is the farthest away from the name. (Even if you try to highlight the line to ensure you got the correct student, it will only highlight the name, not any of the radio check boxes).

4) Once reaching 100 graduating students, click "next" and go through with the rest of the steps until this group is graduated. Then start over again, until all ~400 students are graduated.

The same goes for promoting students. Most of our students get promoted, so it would be logical (I think), for Blackbaud to automatically promote all 9th, 10th, and 11th grade students, UNLESS the users select them as being "not promoted". There will always be MANY less students who are not rising or graduating than those who are. But instead, I have to go through the same process.

1) Use the "Check all" button for "No change"

2) Count to 100 while MANUALLY checking the radio button of each student who is being promoted (in our school, pretty much everyone. If you're not getting promoted, you've withdrawn. We don't repeat grades).

3) Once I get to 100, click "Next" and go through with the promotion process
4) Repeat until all ~400 students in that grade are promoted.