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When you run the OA Eligibility Report, it has seven columns. The last two are “Total Long-Term Camping Nights” and “Total Short-Term Camping Nights.” How are those calculated?
It appears that when calculating the numbers in those columns, IA2 is only looking back 2 years. That is appropriate when calculating “Eligible Long-Term Camping Nights” and “Eligible Short-Term Camping Nights” but without something to warn the user that the report only looks back two years, it can cause confusion.
Example: we have a 17 year-old who is trying to finish up his Eagle requirements, one of which is the Camping Merit Badge. According to the OA Eligibility Report, he only has 2 nights of short term camping. Running the Activity Report shows he actually has 12 short terms nights.
Agreed, that is the standard for OA eligibility but our camping chair and Scoutmaster read the report as saying that “Total” meant that those columns included all camping nights during the youth’s time in Scouts BSA.
Before I hold another, short, class for my adult leaders on “how to use Scoutbook,” I want to confirm how the “Total” nights are being calculated.
A better place to get the Scout’s total number of camping nights would be the activity Logs for camping which will have all that have been entered without date restrictions.
The OA Eligibility Report covers the 2 years prior to whatever election date is entered. The 2-year time period also applies to the Total Camping Nights columns, so that users can compare against the Activity Logs for the same time period.
I would not recommend using the OA Eligibility Report for Camping merit badge nights of camping, because the requirements are different. Instead, I would recommend using an individual Scout’s Activity Log. You will need to manually exclude any nights that do not meet the Camping merit badge requirements, such as cabin camping.
Agreed. I wanted to make sure I was right about how the report worked before I started educating the other adult leaders that they should not rely on the OA Eligibility Report for anything other than just that.
It would be useful if at some point a note could be added to the report that makes it clearer to everyone that the report is only looking back 2 years.
Thank you for confirming how those two “Total” nights columns are calculated. I’m convinced that this is more of a presentation issue. The OA Eligibility Report is easy to run so if you are not familiar with how it is calculated, it can mislead the viewer into thinking those “Totals” columns reflect more than a 2-year look back.
Oh! Yeah, now I see. It is an issue with wording. The wording should be something like “Eligible Long-Term Camping Nights” and “Last 2 Year Total Long-Term Camping Nights”. The same addition to the words for short term “Last 2 Year…”
@CharlesOlson you’re welcome. Thanks to the developers to be willing to add this in a quick manner to the report to help clarify the intention of this report (and direct users to the proper report if needing more information on activities).
