Best way to change a course's number of credits

[denn333]

Some of our classes, such as Algebra 1, have double periods every day, and students are eligible to receive 10 credits instead of 5. The courses (in PowerSchool) are set to 5 credits in previous years.

Question 1: Do we have to create whole new courses to do this? Or is there a safe way to change the number of credits for this year without affecting past years' data?

Question 2: The school year is already underway and we used the existing courses (for now). If I change the course number (and hence the course), is there anything that gets affected, say, in PowerTeacher?  I believe not, but wanted to confirm!

[JeffG9]

Question 1: If you change the credit on a course, it will have no bearing on previously stored grades. Only grades stored after you made the change will have the new credit value.

Question 2: Yes, you can change the course number on a section. It's actually that easy.

[LEBrock]

As JeffG says, a credit change on the course has no direct impact on the grades already stored. However as mentioned in other posts, it can throw off GPA calculations because they can be defined in ways that pull potential credit from the course instead of from the students' individual grades. For that reason at least, it would be better to add a new course with the alternate credit value and schedule the students to sections of that.