These are the actual records which describe what courses a student has taken.  At the University of Louisiana at Monroe, this data was traditionally populated with nightly jobs which pulled data from the mainframe source and inserted it into the appropriate tables.  This is the approach we will discuss here, though keep in mind that with creative overriding of functions or creation of MySQL views, FP might can query your data directly, it just depends on your setup.

Let's go over the individual database tables for FlightPath, and explain how they fit in to FP's functionality.

Required Data

students

This should contain all of your students, and specify their major codes.  At the moment, only one major can be assigned to a student.  Students with double majors may not fit perfectly into FP's model.  The major code must exactly match a code in the degrees table.

Users listed in table must also exist in the users table, with their is_student flag set to "1".

Take note of the catalog_year field.  Catalog years are used throughout FP.  They are presented as the leading year in a range.  So if a student's catalog year is "2007-2008", then you would enter 2007.  This is true in the degrees table, as well as others.

student_courses

These are the courses which a student has attempted, what term_id they attempted it in, and grade they earned.  By default, grades with "MID" are treated as "midterm" grades.  Ex: "AMID" or "BMID" will appear in FP as an enrolled course (in green), with the grade A^mid .  Also, the pseudo-grade "E" is also used for "enrolled" courses.

The term_id field is important, as this is how FP determines the order in which courses were taken, which is vital to FP's logic, since by default when a course is repeated by the student, only the most recent attempt is used, unless specified differently by the degree's requirements.

Optional Data

The following tables are not required, per-se, for FlightPath to function, but they do add significantly to the FlightPath experience.  If you have the time to populate them, you should.

student_developmentals

These are courses which the student is required to complete as developmental (remedial) credits.  They are entered one per line, in a somewhat unusual format, with a tilde between subject and course number.  SUBJ~NUMBER.  Ex:  MATH~0090.

student_tests and standardized_tests

These are the standardized tests which the student has completed, and the scores they made on them.  This information will be displayed on the "View" tab to a student.  For example, ACT, SAT, and CLEP tests might appear in this list.

student_transfer_courses

These are courses which the student attempted at another institution.  The data is based around these other tables: transfer_courses, transfer_institutions, and transfer_eqv_per_student.

See this entry on transfer credits for instructions on setting that up.