Degree Audit Setup

Introduction

The Campus Café Degree Audit evaluates a student’s courses against a programmed set of degree requirements to provide a snapshot of the student’s progress toward completion.

The feature offers:

• Individual degree audits for a student. A student can have multiple majors or minors in the current degree row and the degree audit will produce a separate audit for each.
• Ability to do “what if” scenarios. A student or advisor can run an individual audit, and the catalog (audit) semester or the major can be changed to see what the degree audit will look like with new parameters.
• Batch degree audits. An administrator can create a result set on the Student Finder and print multiple degree audits.
• Reverse degree audit. An administrator can run a batch of degree audits and then use the resulting data to produce a report of outstanding requirements for a group of students.

The Degree Audit itself is made up of the following components:

1. Degree requirements
2. Enrollments, courses and grades by student and semester having a degree level identifier
3. Student degree with current flag and having a major/concentration code and a degree level identifier

Majors to Appear on What if Screen

Institutions can control which majors are visible as alternative majors on the Degree Audit What If screen.

1. Navigate to Admin > Major Maintenance
2. Next to the major to show click the pencil icon
3.  Check the box next to Web Deg. Audit Alt. Major
4. Click Save
   

Degree Audit Settings

Besides the header, institutions can control other aspects of both the text on the degree audit and its behavior. These controls are in Custom Control Maintenance. Select the Context Degree_Audit.

Determining Credits Required to Graduate

The Degree Audit will display the total number of credits required to graduate. The source of this number comes from one of three options and is controlled by custom control DACREDSRCE.

• If this custom control has a value of ‘Y’ the Degree Audit footer’s Required Catalog Credits value will come from the Credits to Graduate box on the Major Detail box. (Admin > Major Maintenance > Edit the Major)
• If this custom control is “N”, there is a special requirement 999 in the Degree Audit Requirement Table to allow the credits to graduate to be expressed per audit (catalog) semester. This is useful if the number of credits to graduate has changed over the years. This requirement would not be processed as a normal requirement in the Degree Audit but exists for informational purposes only. The level of the 999 requirement is 1. To employ this method, set the control to N and also create a Level 1 requirement with the requirement number 999 and tied to the desired semester and major.
• If this custom control is ‘N’ and no 999 sequence exists, the degree audit adds up the requirement credits to determine credits required to graduate.

Determining Which Degree Levels to Consider

In general, the degree audit considers only class enrollments with a degree level corresponding to the degree level for the student's current degree. This can be overridden to allow class enrollments from other levels. (Note that degree levels are not the same as degree audit requirement levels.)

To configure the system to consider multiple degree levels, set Custom Control DA_LEVELS, Sequence 1, Parameter 1 to ‘Y’.

When setting up requirements:

• In a requirement set where not all requirements can be met by additional degree levels each sequence that can be met needs to be updated. The Master Requirement (sequence 0) should not have levels specified and also should not contain any requirement.
• In a requirement set in which all requirements can be met by the same additional  level/levels, each sequence should have the level specified. In this situation, the master record may also contain a requirement and if it does, requires additional degree levels specified.
•  A stand-alone requirement, where only a master requirement is necessary, should have any additional levels specified in the master requirement.  

Each individual requirement, which can be met by levels other than the students current degree must have those levels specified under Degree Level(s) for that requirement. 

The level must be specified within each sequence that the level override is valid for, specifying in the master requirement alone (sequence 0), does not make alternate levels valid for other sequences in the requirement set and will result in unpredictable results when part of a multiple requirement set.   

The levels are keyed in degree level(s) field with field with a space between each additional level as below.   

If an enrollment should be met by level 1 and 5 enrollments, this field should contain ‘1 5’. Therefore regardless of whether the current degree is a level 1 or 5, the requirement would look at enrollments of either of these levels as well as the students’ current degree level. For example, If you have a student whose current degree level is 2, and has a level 2 enrollment that meets the requirement, it would be satisfied since the students current degree level is assumed to satisfy any requirements for the degree audit. 

Determining Audit (Catalog) Year

The degree audit finds the student’s current degree row and retrieves the student's degree audit (catalog) semester and major. 

Requirements for the most recent semester equal to or prior to the audit semester will be fetched and shown on the student's degree audit. For example, if the student’s major is ACC (accounting) and the degree audit semester is 202010 (fall 2019), and the latest requirements set for ACC is 201610 (fall 2015) the degree audit will use fall 2015 to evaluate the degree requirements. In other words, you only need to create a new requirement set if the curriculum changes. 

However, note that if if a single new requirement with a new semester is created, the system will view that one change as the entire curriculum for the major. For example, your general education program requires 6 credits in advanced spaceship engineering in the audit (catalog) year fall 2015. The next year, the institution changes the requirement to 3 credits of basic spaceship engineering and 3 credits of advanced spaceship engineering. You create a new requirement to hold the 3 credits of basic spaceship engineering and a new requirement to hold the 3 (down from 6) credits of advanced spaceship engineering tied to the fall 2016 semester. Campus Cafe will now view these two requirements as the student's entire curriculum if the student's audit (catalog) semester is fall 2016 or later.

Creating Degree Audit Requirements

The degree audits setup consists of categories, requirements, groups (specific classes that define a requirement), cross references (equivalent courses) and comments to display on the audit.

Categories

Categories are broad buckets of requirements. For example, a degree may have major requirements, general education requirements and free electives.

To create categories

1. Navigate to Admin > STParms
2. In the Parameter Code box enter RPCTSR
3. In the Parameter Value box enter a code for the group (the categories will show on the degree audit in alphabetical or numerical order of these codes)
4. Click Add
5. In the Description box enter the description to show on the degree audit
6. Click Save
7. Wait overnight for the server cache to clear or run the Refresh Data Cache by navigating to Admin > Refresh Data Cache > reload data

Requirements

Requirements are the top-most requirements for the degree. For example, a specific course may be required or the student may be able to select from a basket of courses to fulfill the requirement.

Requirements are defined at four levels:

• Level 1 – specific requirements (i.e. EN101 meaning the student must have enrolled with a passing grade in EN101)
• Level 2 – enrollments fitting into a program (initial prefix of a course – i.e. program BIO which is defined as enrollments like BIO101, BIO102, etc.)
• Level 3 – enrollments fitting into an arbitrary group (i.e. – group HUM defined in the group as HUM101, HUM102 and HUM198)
• Level 4 – free electives – any passing grade enrollment not used by another prior requirement

Create a requirement:

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Requirements
3. Click Submit
4. Click Add Record

Major: The student's current major or the alternate major and semester (if selected) is used to link to this table to determine the catalog requirements for the student.

Semester: This indicates the degree audit semester to which the requirements apply. The audit semester from the student’s current degree is used to link to this table. If an exact match for the degree audit semester is not found then the next highest semester found in the table will be used. The semester must be active in Registration Control for it to appear.

Requirement Number: This indicates all requirements with this number are part of a requirement set. Each set has a sequence number of 0 defined as the “master requirement” and can also have 998 additional sequence numbers as necessary to complete the requirement set. Up to 999 requirement sets can be entered.

Sequence Number: The sequence number is used to distinguish between the master requirement for the set (sequence number = 0) and the actual requirements for that set (sequence number > 0). The sequence number can also provide default processing order for the set as well.

Requirement: This is the code for the requirement set.  If Level 1 this would be a course number. If level 2, it would be a subject code.  If level 3, it would be a user-defined group, and if 4, it would be electives. 

Level Group: This indicates the type of match that will satisfy a requirement. The level is specified in master requirement (sequence number=0).  The remaining records in the set (requirement number = master record requirement number and sequence number > 0) detail the course information that if met will satisfy the requirements. 

• Level 1 – specific requirements (i.e. EN101 meaning the student must have enrolled with a passing grade in EN101)
• Level 2 – enrollments fitting into a program (initial prefix of a course – i.e. program BIO which is defined as enrollments like BIO101, BIO102, etc.)
• Level 3 – enrollments fitting into an arbitrary group (i.e. – group HUM defined in the group as HUM101, HUM102 and HUM198)
• Level 4 – free electives – any passing grade enrollment not used by another prior requirement.

This level is not to be confused with the degree level found in the degree and enrollment.

Credits: This field is used in the master requirement to indicate how many credits are needed to meet the requirement. For all other records in the requirement set this field should contain 0. This field’s value will not be used if the Course Counting Custom Control DA_CRSCOUN-1-1 is set to Y. If set to Y, the degree audit will count courses rather than credits.

Category Sort: Choose the category under which to display the requirement. If no category sort is chosen, requirements appear on the degree audit in level/requirement order. This sort does not apply to the processing of requirements, only the order they appear on the printed degree audit.

Description: This description is printed in the requirement section of the degree audit as long as it is not hidden.

Course Sort: Not in use

Hide Flag: Select to hide the requirement

Entirety: Checking this box allows a quasi-“OR” determination on Level 2 (Program) and Level 3 (Group) requirements. This means that the requirement’s non-zero sequence numbers must be met in their entirety before the Master Requirement (sequence number zero) is deemed met. Partial fulfillment of an entirety flagged requirement will result in the partial satisfier being displayed in the Degree Audit but the “Is Met” label being set to “No”.

For example, a school requires that a student take 6 credits of a foreign language and each language class is 3 credits. The school also requires that all 6 credits must be in the same language. For the requirement, sequence number zero would be set to 6 credits. Sequence number 2 would be be FRN with 6 credits required; Sequence number 2 would be be ITL with 6 credits required; Sequence number 3 would be be SPA with 6 credits required. For all sequence numbers the entirety box is checked.

Lower Course Restriction: Courses with numbers equal to or greater than this number will fulfill the requirement.

Upper Course Restriction: Courses with numbers equal to or less than than this number will fulfill the requirement.

Minimum Quality Points: The minimum Quality Point associated with grade for an enrollment to satisfy the requirement. These are entered on the requirements, not the master record as the minimum may be different for separate requirements. Grades are associated with quality points on the Quality Points Table.

Scheduled Semester: Not in use

Degree Level: The degree level associated with the student's current degree is used as a default to determine which enrollments are included on the degree audit. By default, all enrollments of the students’ current degree level are available to meet the requirement. Additional enrollment levels can be included by entering the level/levels with a space in between levels. If an enrollment should be met by level 1 and 5 enrollments, this field should contain ‘1 5’. Therefore regardless of whether the current degree is a level 1 or 5, the requirement would look at enrollments of either of these levels as well as the students current degree level. For example, If you have a student whose current degree level is 2, and has a level 2 enrollment that meets the requirement, it would be satisfied since the student's current degree level is assumed to satisfy any requirements for the degree audit. Any enrollment which could be used to satisfy the requirement because of a degree level specification, but cannot be used because of other constraints not met such as minimum grade, will appear in the taken but not used section of the degree audit.

Total Courses: Input the number of courses needed to satisfy the requirement. This field’s value will only be used if the Course Counting Custom Control DA_CRSCOUN-1-1 is set to Y.

Allow Reuse: Courses used in this requirement may fulfill other requirements.

No Transfers: Check to exclude transfer courses from meeting the requirement.

Order Number: This field provides requirement processing order. Lower numbers are processed first. A zero means process last.  It enables the user to specify the processing order, within level 1, and for all other levels as a whole. Requirements are processed as first by all level 1 requirements.  The level 1 requirements are then put in process number order (lowest to highest with 0 meaning last).  For all requirements with the same process order number, the requirements are processed in requirement number then sequence number order.  All other requirements (levels 2-4) are sorted by process order.   This enables a requirement in a higher level to be processed before a lower level requirement.  If the process order is the same requirements are processed in level, requirement and sequence number order.

Sequential Order: This integer field is used to order Level 1 requirements for use in the Predictive Scheduling of the batch reverse degree audit.

Course Type 1-4: The Course Type limit logic applies to Level 2 and 3 requirements and allows a filter to be placed on enrollments by course type before accepting the enrollment for requirement satisfaction. For example, if a course is flagged as type “W” for workshop, affected requirements can be configured to limit only 1 enrollment of type “W” for fulfillment purposes. Extra enrollments of the filtered type are ignored and treated as unused. The course type limits are sub-requirement specific, so they are not put into the master requirement (sequence 0). Course types are set on the Course screen under the Codes tab in the Course Degree Audit Limit Type drop down.

Type Count 1-4: The maximum number of courses of the specified type to accept for the requirement.

Overall Type Limit:

Sched Sub Sem 1-6: Not in use

Example Requirement Setups

When a requirement is specified, there are implied AND and ORS depending on the specification.

Implied OR Example 1

The below example means the student must complete any of the four courses that add up to 6 credits so there is an implied OR.

Implied OR Example 2

This below example means the student must complete 9 credits from the group of courses that have any of the four prefixes listed, so there is an implied OR.

For this example to work all course subject codes (HU, SO, PH, MG) must be the same length. (In the example they are all two characters long.) In addition, all the numerical values of the courses (e.g. 100, 203, 401, etc.) must be the same length. Lengths are defined using custom control WEBCRPLEN 

Implied OR Example 3

The below example means the student must complete 12 credits from any courses that exist in any of the 4 groups listed, so there is an implied OR.

Implied AND

The below example assumes that BIO 101 and BIO 102 are both 3-credit courses. The below requirement requires 6 credits thereforce there is an implied AND because students must take both classes to fulfill the requirement to reach 6 credits.

Copy Requirements

Campus Cafe provides the ability to copy requirements from one catalog year to another.

To copy all requirements or select requirements

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Requirements
3. Click Copy Requirements
4. In the Source Major drop down select the major to copy (Note: to copy all majors, do not select a major and instead use the Copy All Majors Button)
5. In the Source Semester drop down select the semester to copy from
6. In the Req # box optionally enter the requirement number to copy; leave blank to copy all requirements
7. In the Cat Sort box optionally enter the category to copy; leave blank to copy all requirements
8. In the Destination Major drop down select the major to copy the requirements to
9. In the Destination Semester drop down select the semester to copy the requirements to
10. In the Req # box optionally enter the requirement number to copy the requirements to; leave blank to copy all requirements
11. In the Cat Sort box optionally enter the category to copy the requirements to ; leave blank to copy all requirements
12. Click Copy

Delete Requirements

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Requirements
3. Next to the requirement(s) to delete, check the box
4. Click the Delete Selected button
5. Click Delete to confirm the deletion

Groups

Requirements set to level 3 will select from a defined basket of courses. An example may include a general education category for which the courses that fulfill the requirement do not follow a pattern.

Create a group

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Groups
3. Click New Record

Grouping: Enter the Requirement code

Semester: This indicates the degree audit semester to which the requirements apply. The audit semester from the student’s current degree is used to link to this table. If an exact match for the degree audit semester is not found then the next highest semester found in the table will be used. All semesters (active and inactive) from Registration Control will appear in the dropdown.

Description: This description is printed in on the degree audit.

Course Number: Enter the course code exactly as it appears in the catalog

Copy Groups

Campus Cafe provides the ability to copy a group from one catalog year to another. The copy works by single group only and does not support copying multiple groups at once.

To copy all groups or select requirements

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Groups
3. Click Copy Group
4. In the Source Group box enter the group to copy
5. In the Source Semester drop down select the semester to copy from
6. In the Source Group box enter the group to copy the group to
7. In the Destination Group box enter the group to copy to (typically the same as the source)
8. In the Destination Semester drop down select the semester to copy to
9. Click Submit

Delete Group

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Groups
3. Next to the group(s) to delete, check the box
4. Click the Delete Selected button
5. Click Delete to confirm the deletion

Cross References

If two courses are equivalent, you can specify each course individually during the requirement and/or group setup. Alternatively, you can specify that one course should always be treated as an equivalent to another. For example, you may have a Level I requirement that specifies the student take the course PIE101. You can leverage cross references to inform that system that DES102 is equivalent to PIE101 and fulfills any requirement that calls for PIE101.

Create a cross reference

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Cross Reference
3. Click New Record
4. In the Course Num box enter the course code (e.g. PIE101) that is equivalent to another
5. In the Start Semester drop down select the semester this equivalency became effective
6. In the End Semester drop down select the semester this equivalency ended
7. In the Req Course Number box enter the equivalent course code (e.g. DES102)
8. In the Req Credits enter the credits for the course
9. Click Create
10. If the opposite equivalent is true (e.g. DES102 is equal to PIE101) you must build a reciprocal rule by following the above directions. Place DES102 in the Course Num box and PIE101 in the Req Course Numb box.
11. The equivalent will become effective after the server restarts, which occurs automatically each evening.

Comments

Comments will show on the degree audit to add contextual information about the curriculum.

Create comment

1. Navigate to Registrar > Degree Audit Maintenance
2. Click Comments
3. Click New Record

Semester: This indicates the degree audit semester to which the requirements apply.  The audit semester from the student’s current degree is used to link to this table.  If an exact match for the degree audit semester is not found then the next highest semester found in the table will be used.

Major: The major for which the comment applies.

Comment Boxes 1-10: Comments to display on the degree audit.

Work Flow Notes

Work Flow's Name, Due Date, and Comment/Notes Box 1 field can also be shown at the bottom of a degree audit by selecting the "Print on Degree Audit" checkbox on the Workflows Definition Detail. The Email/Comment box will not appear on the degree audit; only the smaller Comment/notes box 1 under a workflow will appear.

This is how it appears on the degree audit. The blue due date box is for reference only, it does not appear on the degree audit itself: