News

Elective Requirement for Ohio Graduation
We have started to receive some questions about the COURSE_REQ_FLAG that was recently added to the Graduation Cohort reports. Although this flag does not impact if a student is counted as a graduate or not (we only look at the diploma date for this), if your graduates have an ‘N’ for this flag even though you have determined locally that they met course requirements, that ‘N’ value may indicate that you have miscoded some students and that those coding errors may also be present for future graduates.
 
Since this credit reporting will be used extensively in the new Progress Towards Graduation module in ODDEX, we are sharing information on common issues we are seeing in the data. If you have any of these issues, please work to get them fixed, especially for those students who have yet to graduate.
 
One of the issues we have found is that students are not being reported with enough elective credits. We believe that much of this issue is related to miscoding of the subject area for credit on the Course Master (CN) and/or Graduation–Core Summary (GC) Records.
 
To assist you in working on this issue, we are providing 2 files through the data collector.

• 2023_STUDENT_in_Elective_Courses: This file lists courses and counts of students in those courses where the subject area for credit has been reported as an elective but the subject code for the course suggests that reporting a more specific credit area may be appropriate.
• 2023_GRAD_Diploma_Poss_Credit_Coding_Errors: This file lists students reported with a diploma, which will include them in the graduation rate, but when reviewing the graduation credits reported, some areas seem to be lacking. These students do not have to be updated for FY23 reporting; they are being shared in hopes of fixing these course coding errors for continuing students.

Although we are focusing on elective credits in this Newsflash, we will address other areas where we believe coding errors are occurring (such as how science and social studies credits are coded) in the coming weeks. Fixing this data and resubmitting your Current Graduation Credit Progress Collection will be especially important for helping guidance counselors get the maximum benefit from the Progress Towards Graduation module to be added to ODDEX within the next few weeks.
 
Ohio law states that the elective credits required for state graduation must include “one or any combination of foreign language, fine arts, business, career-technical education, family and consumer sciences, Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs, technology, agricultural education, or English language arts, mathematics, science, or social studies courses not otherwise required.”
 
Because not all courses are eligible to be counted towards electives, it is important that any credits expected to be included in a student’s electives be coded on the Graduation–Core Summary (GC) Record with a subject area for credit other than ‘ELE’. The EMIS Manual indicates that the most specific option that would apply is the one that should be reported. For example, if a student takes a business course as an elective report the ‘BUS’ option instead of the ‘ELE’ option since the ‘BUS’ option is more specific.
 
The following subject areas for credit automatically count towards electives.

	SUBJECT AREA FOR CREDIT CODE	DESCRIPTION
	BUS	Business
	CTA	Career/Technical
	FAR	Fine Arts
	FIN	Financial Literacy
	FLR	Foreign Language
	HEC	Family and Consumer Sciences (Non-Career-Technical)
	JTC	JROTC-Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps
	TEC	Technology Education/Computer Science
	TEL	Technology Education/Computer Science used as World Language credit

Credits reported with subject area for credit code ‘HTH’ (Health Education) only count towards the ½ credit Health requirement. Similarly, credits reported with subject area for credit code ‘PHE’ (Physical Education) only count towards the ½ credit Physical Education requirement. Any extra credit earned in Health Education or Physical Education will not be included in the electives count.

Credits reported with subject area for credit code ‘ELE’ are not included in the electives count.
 
Any other subject area for credit not mentioned above may potentially count towards electives if not already being counted towards the English, Math, Science, or Social Studies requirements. For example, if a student has five credits reported in English (ENG), four of the credits will count towards the English requirement and one credit will count towards the elective requirement.