“Automatically compute completion status” is a checkbox that can be enabled/disabled on a roster when you are recording attendance. It is typically used when you need to disable it so as to record attendance separately from course completion. It should never be unchecked unless you require more than attendance in order to grant credit for completing a course. If you do uncheck it you should be aware of what this means. Read on.
When “Automatically compute completion status” is checked then the date the course was held is recorded as the date it was completed. They are one and the same date.
When you uncheck that box you can manually control when they get a completion status for the course separately from their attendance record. You do this by checking “completed successfully” when you are ready to give them credit (presumably after a quiz or assignment is turned in) and then clicking Finalize.
Recording attendance:
When they attend the class then you only mark attendance but do not check “completed successfully”. You then click “Save for later” which records the attendance you wanted to preserve and leaves this open roster in your to do list for you to finish later, presumably by recording the completions.
Recording completions:
When you have graded their quiz or exercise or whatever requirement you specified beyond attendance, you need to give them credit for completing the course. You do this by clicking on your still open roster and putting a check mark in the “completed successfully” column for each user who deserves to be given this credit, then you record this in the database and remove this open roster from your to do list by clicking “Finalize”. This action of saving the roster (either by finalizing or save for later) when you have the “completed successfully” boxes checked results in the current date being saved to the database for all users for which that box was currently checked when you saved.
Recommendation
Be sure you finalize rosters to close them and remove them from your open roster list after you have finished recording all the completions you need so that you don’t accidentally finalize them at a later date and thus overwrite the correct completion date with today’s date.
Tags: attendance, roster
