The DARS Executive Degree Audit Committee met at ACT on February 4, 1998. This committee is made up of just a few members representing various departments and colleges.

In Attendance: Roy Hermer, Todd Clopine, Nancy Groves, Fred Atchison, Diane Hamann, Brad Anderson, Sarah Spear-Barrett, Mike Kane, Lea Mizumoto, Helen Gunn

A new update to the DARS engine will be released at the end of February. This update will strongly affect the 'look' of the degree audit.

ACT suggested calling the degree audits, "Degree Progress Checks". Roy Hermer has asked to have one person in charge of the wording that appears on the web pages for the Degree Audit System.

Look of the Degree Audit

Nancy Groves requested a quick, simple, one-page overview to be the first audit seen on the web. She also suggested that if needed, a student could "click" on a certain requirement area to see all of the details concerning that requirement. Roy asked for input on the appearance of the Degree Progress Check.

Three levels of detail in the degree audit was also suggested:

Nancy suggested it would be extremely useful for staff to see all courses a student has taken. This way, an advisor could suggest using one of those classes to meet a missing requirement.

Concerning all of the above, Todd has stated that since each line in the DARS systems is identified, each can be shown or suppressed as desired, so we should be able to get any level of detail we want. Todd said that first he wants to get all of the programs working and then he'll begin working on the visual format.

Other Degree Audit Details

Lea reminded the group that as DARS pulls down a student's academic history from ISIS, it will probably have to be 're-combined' first in order to get the most recent approximations. Other ways of handling this were also discussed. Roy said he could also bring down a list of "unapproximated course work."

For the future, how TAG and IGETC will be handled needs to be dealt with.

Timeline

There is no confirmed timeline at this point. However, it was dreamed that having the java version available to staff over the summer for training purposes would be great. Then perhaps it could actually be used for fall '98 graduating seniors.

There will be a meeting of the all-inclusive DARS Review Committee on Wednesday, February 11, 1998 in Conference Room 111A from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. A general overview will be presented as to the look, feel and status of the Degree Audit System.

I'll be glad to make any corrections or additions to these minutes. Please contact Helen Gunn