If you have students taking assessments of a different year group to their National Curriculum Year, you can create an out of year group for these students in order to successfully assign them to the relevant assessment. You must be a School or MAT Admin in order to do this.
Creating out of year groups allow you to enter question-level data and therefore do question and topic level analysis for students working below their NC Year level. Out of year group students won't be included in the standardisation sample used to calculate standardised grades for the assessment, but you will be able to see the associated standardised grades in the analysis module (see more detail below).
NOTE: This feature is for creating out of year groups only - it cannot not be used for creating custom classes such as same-year intervention groups, as the students have to be from a different year group to be able to add them to an out of year group class.
How to create out of year groups
To create out of year groups, click the three yellow lines in the top-right corner, select 'Configuration', then select 'Out of year groups' from the left-hand menu:
Note: If you are a MAT admin, you first need to select which school you want to create the group in.
Click CREATE GROUP; this will bring up a window where you can now input/select the details for the out of year group:
Subject: Each group will be subject-specific.
Smartgrade year group: The year of the assessment(s) you want to assign to the student(s) in this group.
Group name: What you will see when assigning this group to an assessment in the Marketplace.
Student: You can search for a specific student name, or enter a National Curriculum Year Group and search for students within a Year Group (as above).
Teacher: the teacher(s) who can enter data for this out of year group in the Markbooks area.
Once you've created groups, you will see them listed in this section, and can edit or delete them by clicking on the three dots under Actions:
You can then assign, refresh and input data for your out of year groups in the same way you do with your other classes.
Note: Students will still appear in their regular class markbook after being assigned to an out of year group. Where a student is sitting a test out of year we strongly recommend assigning a zero for them in their regular class markbook. If you're using a markbook that allows data entry at whole grade level you can do this in the total column; if you are using a markbook that requires question level data you should copy-paste a 0 into every cell for that student. Doing this means that the student is factored into any standardisation run on their own year group's data, which is important to keep a representative standardisation sample. This is better than marking them as absent, since absent students don't get included in a standardisation.
Out of year groups and Analysis
Students from out of year group classes will not be included in the standardisation sample of an assessment. However students in an out of year group markbook will still be assigned a raw score/raw %/percentile rank/standardised score/smartgrade(s) (where applicable) and you will still be able to do Question/Topic/Part-level analysis (where applicable).
When viewing attainment, subject or progress analysis, out of year groups will show separately from standard year groups in the "In" drop-down selector.
If you select an ‘out of year’ group and one or more class is selected the following message is shown in red directly below the selectors, making clear that the standardised grades shown DO NOT represent students' performance in relation to their peers: