Can we have different assessment periods for different student groups?

It is not possible to set up one assessment with different assessment periods for different student groups e.g. year groups or key stages. You have two options for managing your data drops if they are different between different student groups.

If you have already set up your assessments and need to change your assessment periods, please follow these instructions: Can we change or edit the assessment periods once the assessment is set up?

Option 1 - Set up more than one assessment

When setting up your assessments, you'll need to set up a new assessment for each student group, and link each one to the assessment periods you want to use for that student group.

Progress 8 assessments can only be set up once on each school site. As such, you won't be able to use progress 8 assessments when using this option, or our out-of-the-box analysis.

When doing assessment analysis, you will have multiple assessments to analyse rather than just one, but you can still compare your assessments between years using the Transition Matrix page.

Option 2 - Set up one assessment

Using this option, you'll need to set up one assessment with the maximum number of assessment periods you'll need. For example, if your year 10s need termly assessments, but year 11 needs half-termly, you'll need to set up 6 assessment periods.

This means that teachers will need to 'skip' some assessment periods (leaving these marks blank or adding a not required mark), so you'll need to let them know which assessment periods are required. You can also make it clear to teachers when marking is required using Data Collections.

This option means that you can analyse assessment marks for your students together and saves you time that would be needed in copying baselines and targets across to different assessments.