Design question

[John Milner]

Somewhat re: issue 293, http://code.google.com/p/student-worker-relational-database/issues/detail?id=293

What should happen in this hypothetical situation?

• A course is set to meet in two semesters;
• The teacher uploads/enters online/whatever grades in both semesters;
• The registrar later changes the course to meet only in the first semester;
• The registrar prints the transcript of a student enrolled in the course.

Should django-sis just abide by the registrar's whim and not print second-semester grades for the course?

[David Burke]

I think it should obey the registrar. In some sense it should cascade delete the entire gradebook for the semester that the course is no longer related to. There is no warning for this, so just having the grades orphaned is probably fine.

In such an event though the teacher should no longer have any way to see those orphaned grades exists.

[John Milner]

I agree that the teacher should have no way to see the orphaned grades.

It seems easy for the registrar to accidentally remove (and then re-add to correct) a marking period assignment, so cascade delete might be a bad idea. I'd say that the big, fat Django warning should be sufficient, but people have managed to blow past that.