Managing Curriculum, Sections, and Course Records
Last updated: August 20, 2026
Overview
Understanding how these pieces relate makes day-to-day catalog work much easier:
Courses are the catalog entries for everything your district teaches — for example, "Algebra I" or "AP Biology." A course defines shared information like credits, grade level, and transcript category.
Sections are the actual class offerings of a course in a given term — for example, "Algebra I, Period 3, Fall 2026." A single course can have many sections across schools and terms, each with its own teacher, roster, and capacity.
Course records refer to the underlying data tied to a course — its settings, its sections, and every student enrollment associated with it. Keeping course records clean (no duplicates, correct categories) keeps transcripts, schedules, and reporting accurate.
Managing your course catalog
The Courses page in the left sidebar is the central place to browse, search, and filter every course in your district. From there you can create new courses, edit course settings such as credits and transcript category, and archive courses you no longer offer. Archiving retires a course from the active catalog while preserving its historical sections and enrollments — nothing is deleted.
For a full walkthrough of filtering, editing, and archiving courses, see Using the Courses page.
Adding and managing sections
Sections let you divide a course into the specific classes your school actually runs — by period, teacher, school, or any other grouping. You add sections from a course's Sections tab, where you set the section name, terms, enrollment cap, and optionally restrict it to certain schools or learning centers and assign a teacher.
At the start of a new term, you can copy existing sections forward instead of recreating them from scratch — the settings carry over, though you'll need to enroll students in the new sections separately.
For step-by-step instructions, see Adding a section to a course, which also covers copying sections to future terms.
You can also enroll a student in a section directly from their course plan — see Enrolling a student in sections from their co
Keeping course records accurate
Over time, districts sometimes end up with the same course entered more than once, or with courses that should be consolidated into a single record. Scout's course merge tool combines 2–6 courses into one: all sections and student enrollments move to the surviving course, and the source courses are removed. Grades and assignments are never lost — they stay attached to their sections throughout the merge.
Only district and school administrators can merge courses. For the full process, including how to resolve conflicting fields and section identifiers, see Merging courses.
Related: course plans and templates
If your district plans out which courses students will take across multiple years, course plan templates let you build a standard sequence and assign it to many students at once. See Creating and editing course plan templates and Bulk assigning course plan templates to students.
Tips
Start with the course, then add sections. A course must exist in the catalog before you can create sections for it.
Archive instead of deleting. Archiving a course keeps its historical sections and enrollment data intact, while removing it from the active catalog.
Check for duplicate courses before a new term. Use the Courses page filters to spot look-alike course names, then merge duplicates so enrollment and reporting aren't split across records.
Section terms must share a school year. A section's date range is derived from the terms you select, so pick terms carefully when scheduling.