Grades 1 - 10 come already seeded into the Candle database. Unless your school has grades outside of 1-10, you should never need to update/add to the list of grade levels.

Student groups are groups of students at a particular grading level. You can create as many Student Groups as you need for your school's needs.

Let's take a real-life scenario to clarify:

    At Sugar Creek School, there are Grades 1st through 9th. This is how 7th and 8th grade looked:

    7th Grade: Adriana, Austin, Derlyn, Sarah, and Wendy
    8th Grade: Carson, Andrea, Josiah, Daniel, and Annie

    This term, 7th and 8th Grade did Science together. To accommodate this, the administrator created an additional student group:  7th & 8th Science. He added all of the students from both 7th and 8th groups to the new group. 

    7th and 8th Science:  Adriana, Austin, Derlyn, Sarah, Wendy, Carson, Andrea, Josiah, Daniel, and Annie

    He set the Grade Level to 7th Grade, so Candle would use the 7th Grade assignment weights for grade calculation.

A Primary Student Group

Any given student/child can be in multiple student groups, but each child has only one group that is their primary group. For example, Derlyn is in the 7th Grade group but he is also in the 7th and 8th Science group. In this example, 7th Grade is his primary group. You can set a child's primary group on the family edit page. 

Let's take a special ed situation as an example:

Kyler does Math and Reading with a private tutor. In this case, we would create a student group called Kyler's Subjects. We would add Kyler to that student group, then always enter grades into that group in the gradebook. When you run reports, always be sure to choose Kyler's Subjects to show the correct grades.

Finally, school terms are a collection of Student Groups. These groups define the students in school for the term.