The Degree Audit

Degree audits are somewhat of a technological marvel. In the first episode of season 7, we explore what a degree audit is, what it does, and ways that institutions can (and should) be using the data degree audits provide in order to make their students’ lives (and their own) easier. Along the way we talk about curriculum development, the Catalog and the role it plays as the foundation of the audit, and the way catalog year governs requirements students are held to.   

Key Takeaways:

• “Degree audit” is a term that can refer to both the process of confirming a student has met all of the requirements for a sought credential as well as the tool used to assist with that process. Doug thinks of a degree audit in terms of the tool itself. 
• The Catalog is the foundation of the degree audit. Only fully approved curricular requirements should be reflected in the degree audit. 
• Requirements-based reporting using the data-rich degree audit data should be leveraged by institutions to streamline administrative processes and provide intrusive advising.  

Host:

Doug McKenna, University Registrar
George Mason University
cmckenn@gmu.edu 

NOTE: I think I said “invasive advising” in the episode…I meant “intrusive advising,” but I didn’t re-record it. I apologize. 

References and Additional Information:

Rethinking the Degree Audit - in AACRAO Guide to Graduation Ceremonies

Degree Audit references and resources

AACRAO Professional Proficiencies - 

Knowledge of Student Records Management

Data Systems Management

I’m Just a Bill - Schoolhouse Rock

Strange Bedfellows: The Registrar’s Office and University Policy and Curriculum Committees

Transcript

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You're listening to for the record, a registrar podcast sponsored by Acro. I'm your host, Doug mckenna University Registrar at George Mason University. This is the degree audit. Hello, we are kicking off season seven of for the record. Can you believe it? It still amazes me sometimes that this is a thing. Thank you for joining me on this ride. Another thing I can't believe is that it's taken seven seasons before I've done an episode about the degree audit. That seems like a bit of an oversight on my part, especially considering I started my higher ed career as a degree audit coordinator. And I've been pretty open about how important I think the degree audit is recently though Aaron Mason pinged me asking about a degree audit focused episode and there wasn't one until now. So let's fix that today. We're going to talk about what a degree audit is, how it works, its relationship to the catalog, ways to use degree audit data and then what the future holds for degree audits and it's just me today. So sit back and enjoy the melodious sound of my voice right out of the gate. We should define our terms because as is sometimes the case in higher education, we can be saying the same words but meaning different things. A degree audit is simply the process of confirming that a student has fulfilled all of the requirements for their pursued program of study, which usually takes place at the time of degree conferral or at various points leading up to degree conferral. This could be referred to as a graduation check or a conferral check. Local flavors definitely apply in this area. A degree audit though as I will use the term for the rest of this episode is the tool used to conduct that confirmation of requirements completion. So degree audit is a term that can refer to a process or to a specific system or application. I think of it in terms of the system or application in the digital age. Degree audits have morphed into somewhat of a technological marvel. They combine degree requirements from the catalog with the students own individual academic information, including their degree, major concentrations, minors, registration information and academic history. Providing a simple, straightforward method for students, advisors and administrators to confirm that the student is on track, to complete his or her degree and to guide the student along the way by providing information about how to meet the program requirements and what requirements remain unmet. I like to say that the registrar's office sits at the center of the academic services of an institution and the degree audit sits at the center of the registrar's office. It is the intersection of policy regulations, student data and administrative actions. It's one of the most important tools a registrar's office wields. So let's talk about it. Let's step back for a moment and talk about degree audit systems themselves. There are a handful of solid third party vendors who provide degree audit services and both of the major, er, p providers. I Lucian and peoplesoft oracle, I guess, deliver some version of a degree audit. I am only aware of a handful of homegrown degree audit systems. And one of those is just a modification of the er P delivered solution. The complexity of the audit engine that powers these applications really puts them firmly in third party vendor territory and complexity is a good word for degree audits. They're used by a number of different constituents in a number of different ways. So it's very possible to be strong in one area but less so in another students use the degree audit. Sure, but they aren't the primary users of the degree audit at an institution that would be academic advisors followed closely by the degree clearance team in the registrar's office. You want to make sure that those two user groups know what they're doing in the system and that their needs are met the way I see it, the critical components are really as follows. A good degree audit will be comprehensive. It will include all of the requirements for a student's chosen course of study. Even those requirements that may not be course based. This is important because if a student is relying on the degree audit to plan what classes to take, to fulfill requirements and they do everything in the audit and then oops surprise, there's more that is just a bad scene all around. The worst case scenario with a degree audit is a false positive showing that a student has completed everything when they actually haven't, false negatives are easier to deal with. The false positives are harder to spot and their resolution is often more painful. So a comprehensive audit is the first step in avoiding false positives. A good degree audit will be accessible. It'll be designed for use on more than a computer screen. So responsive design and intuitive meaning it's easy to read, easy to navigate and easy to interpret. If you need an in depth user guide to explain what your degree audit is communicating. It's not communicating it very well. It's also 2024. We've been in a connected world for a while. So there are minimum standards of acceptability from students about the modernness of the look and feel of an application. It needs to look like it was made in this century, if not decade for students to really engage with it. A good degree audit has accurate and up to date student information. So it's connected in some way to the student information system. This seems like a pretty obvious one. But I think it's worth mentioning most if not all of the degree audit applications I've used have been updated via a nightly process. There are really only a handful of times in the semester when the audits should be changing. But having at least an overnight update process is about the minimum standard to aim for. And there are technical ways to reduce the burden of that overnight push too like creating a hash file, for example, which students are added to only if something about the students data has changed in the student information system that day in the middle of this semester. That might not be anyone during registration or as grades are being submitted. That'll be a lot more people having audits refreshed, a good degree audit has a robust exception handling capability. I say this all the time in my job, we work at a university. It has universe right there in the name, there are infinite possibilities. 100% of students will never adhere 100% to 100% of the requirements as published in the catalog. That is just a fact, obviously, it's important to account for as many nuances in the requirements, coding as possible. But there will always be a need to process an exception against a requirement to demonstrate that the requirement is met and to make sure that the appropriate class or classes or non course requirements are reflected in the audit and a good degree audit has an easy to use interface for configurations, requirements, coding, versioning of requirements and processing of substitutions, exceptions and waivers. So since I've mentioned the requirements a couple of times, just now, let's shift gears for a minute to talk about how something becomes a requirement and how it gets coded into the degree audit. In order to talk about the degree audit, you have to understand curriculum development and the catalog in higher education, the faculty are responsible for the curriculum. So whether it's a new requirement for a major, a change to an existing requirement or a complete revision to a program of study degree requirements begin with the faculty. When a faculty member has an idea for a revision to a program, there are several steps involved and several levels of interrogation involved. These are the lenses through which the idea has to be viewed before making it to be an actual requirement. This process is like the schoolhouse rock. I'm just a Bill Song. I'll include a link to that in the show notes just for fun. OK, accrediting bodies exist to make sure that institutions are operating at certain standards and these can be state regional or discipline specific bodies. Does this idea for a curricular revision align with accreditation standards and expectations? That's a basic level analysis. The curriculum proposal is usually benchmarked which is the process of comparing requirements of like programs at other institutions to see if what's being proposed is way out of bounds or if it's super common, a requirement being super rare, doesn't necessarily disqualify it. Institutions can and do make innovative choices in their curriculum. Another lens would be how does the idea support the learning objectives of the program? And further does the idea align with the strategic plan of the department of the college and the institution? And maybe most importantly, are there resources available to implement the idea? Let's say this idea for a revision makes it all the way through all of that interrogation with flying colors. A curriculum proposal is then submitted through the curriculum management system usually but not always administered by the office of the university Registrar where it will be reviewed by a number of committees. I'm speaking generally here as it's likely that the proposal was initiated in the system and then the interrogation through those various lenses began. And I'm certain that there are other models of curricular governance than what I'm about to describe. But in my experience at five different institutions, this is a reasonable summary of the process to imagine. OK. So at the committee review stage of our curricular revision, the first committee is usually within the department where the idea originated to make sure that all the previously identified lenses have been thoughtfully reviewed. And next might be the school or college level curriculum committee where other faculty from different disciplines within the school or college review and assess the proposal, not all departments have their own curriculum committee. And so the college level review might be the proposal's first stop. Finally, a university level committee is where faculty representatives from other schools and colleges across the institution review the proposal specifically with an eye as to how it might affect any of their own offerings or programs. Sometimes these committees are institution wide, sometimes they are delineated by undergraduate or graduate. Sometimes they're grouped by like disciplines. Faculty governance models is probably another good topic for a deeper dive on a podcast episode. Hm, if only I knew someone who had a podcast to talk about it at any point in this process, the proposal might be sent back to the department for revisions or clarifications. This is all part of a shared governance model. Every proposal is reviewed by a bunch of faculty members. So when it's approved, you know that it has gone through a rigorous review process and once approved, it moves through the curriculum management system and the changes are reflected in the next catalog. Every single requirement in your catalog has gone through this process or one close to it at one point in your institution's existence, I'll mention it here and I'm sure I'll say it again, but you can see how important it might be for the registrar's office staff to be involved with the curriculum review process. In some way, we bring a particular viewpoint and institutional knowledge to bear to be able to guide what's feasible, what can or can't be enforced by the system and whether something will make sense to students, those things aren't always on the faculty's radar when they're developing curriculum proposals. So it's much better to be involved upfront to influence the process rather than just being forced to react to the result of the process. Way back in 2009, I think maybe I give a presentation with Doctor Linda O Stanford from Michigan State entitled Strange Bedfellows, the registrar's office and university policy and curriculum committees. It is a fun topic. OK. Now we're getting closer to circling around back to the degree audit, but there's one more very important thing we need to talk about first. So stick with me. I think it's worth it. The catalog is the foundation of the degree audit. The catalog serves as a contract of sorts between students and the institution. Sometimes it's called a bulletin of Information or a university catalog. Whatever the title of this particular publication at your institution is, this is the purpose it serves. The catalog is published once every year, usually in the late spring or early summer so that it can be available for students who are considering attending will be attending orientation over the summer or who might be transferring to the institution. The catalog publication schedule obviously drives many of the curriculum management deadlines that the faculty must adhere to the catalog governs a full academic year consisting of the fall semester, spring semester and summer sessions. Not surprisingly, that time period is often referred to as the catalog year and it is associated with the student. It is the degree requirements as printed in the catalog year when a student matriculates that the student must complete to earn their sought credential. I say again, it is the degree requirements as printed in the catalog. The year a student matriculates at the institution that the student must complete to earn their sought credential. I say that as a declarative statement, but there are some exceptions which we'll talk about in a few historically and really only until very recently, the university catalog was a physical artifact published on actual paper. Some institutions would print enough copies to provide one each to every incoming student. And that's a good visual because if you think about the institution saying here are your requirements as they hand a copy of the catalog to the student and the student carrying that physical catalog around for four plus years, referring back to the listed requirements whenever they change majors. That's a good way to understand why we think about catalog year, the way that we do regular listeners of for the record, along with anyone who has worked in a registrar's office in the past, I don't know, 10 years or so will know that technology has significantly affected the way we conduct business. With the advent of the internet, the catalog has shifted to the digital realm and this has caused some debate about whether or not the catalog should remain unchangeable as it would have been in its physical form or whether intermittent changes should be incorporated as they are approved. Even in a digital form, it is widely accepted that once published even electronically, the catalog should not be changed. So what is actually in the catalog again, I'm gonna speak generally, your catalog may align nicely with what I'm about to describe or it might not or maybe I'll hit 80% of it and we'll call that good. You can think of the catalog as having three main sections. The first of which includes institutional information like tuition fees, enrollment numbers, and other factual or historical information, academic policies and other regulatory information. This information is at the front of the catalog and is generally referred to as front matter material while it is reviewed and may require approval to be changed. It does not generally flow through the curriculum review and approval process. It's handled separately. Notably, a lot of the front matter material is required by either state higher education associations or accrediting bodies. This is another historical artifact from the idea of catalog as contract students needed a place to find all of that pertinent information. And pre 1994 there wasn't the World wide Web, just books. The second main division of the catalog is generally what we think of as the catalog. It's all of the school or college information, detailing the requirements for every program of study the institution is approved to offer. This also includes the academic requirements at the institutional level. Think general education requirements for undergraduates or general information on comprehensive exams. For example, the third and final main division of the catalog is a comprehensive listing of the institution's faculty, including their rank title and credentials. And while the faculty are a critical part of any institution, they generally aren't directly involved with how degree audits are coded. The degree audit pulls together all of the different elements that govern the requirements for a selected program of study, regardless of where they appear in the catalog. This eliminates the need for students to track down applicable academic policies in the front matter and find the college specific requirements in a different section and specific major requirements in yet another section. So not to put too fine a point on it. But this is a super time saver especially for advisor who will have to bounce from student to student, all who have different elements of their curriculum to parse. So let's get down to the nitty gritty here. How are requirements coded into the degree audit? Well, first, they don't magically appear there and there isn't yet a way to automatically translate the way requirements are stated in the catalog directly into a degree audit. So there is a person or group of people whose job it is to interpret the requirements in the catalog into whatever system the institution is using for their degree audit. This is why it's so important to be at least informed if not actively involved in the articulation of the requirements by the faculty. Sometimes the faculty will want something that is not enforceable by the system. A good degree audit analyst or curriculum specialist will recognize that limitation and help meet the desired outcome of the requirement in a way that the system can support. There's a little bit of an art to it and you have to enjoy logic puzzles. I started my higher ed career as a degree audit coordinator at the University of Notre Dame working in degree works, then Notre Dame implemented banner and we got rid of degree works. So I recoded all of the requirements into C A the curriculum and program planning module within banner. When I went to Michigan State, we used degree Navigator and then I came back to degree works when I moved to GW again, coding a healthy portion of the requirements before Kim Snead and Becca Zacharias took over and let's be honest, made things much better at A U. We used the delivered audit function and colleague and I frankly wasn't very involved with the audit at A U and Mason has been on degree works for a while and we are currently implementing ste. So I've been in a few different kinds of audits with a variety of audit building interfaces in my time. Yes, indeed. I've seen a few audits in my time. Some systems like degree works have a custom interface with a proprietary coding language that degree audit analysts have to learn to create the blocks of requirements. Some systems like cap that delivered audit function within banner have a complicated set of nested logic statements that an analyst gets to build within the banner admin apps forms. Other systems like decision academics, Degree Navigator have a fun concept of requirement islands where you drag and drop courses to make little degree island clusters. However, requirements are entered, it's done by a person. Now, frequently requirements are stated in pretty straightforward ways. Take one class from these three classes or take three credits from this list or take 15 credits from courses with a history subject code. Those are easy to code. It's when there are combined dependencies where things start to get fun, something like take these two courses. Unless you've taken this other course, then take these other two courses instead. Again, there are seemingly limitless numbers of combinations of those types of requirements, dependencies based on the presence or absence of a concentration code or the presence or absence of a particular student attribute on the combination of two majors. If the student is in the honors program, you you get the point. There are also courses that have significant overlapping content. And so students are only able to receive credit for one of them, those kinds of restrictions along with minimum grades to meet a requirement, minimum GPA S to meet the requirement for a major minimum institutional credits, et cetera. Those are all critical to incorporate into the audit again, think comprehensive. So the curriculum proposal is moving along, maybe someone in the registrar's office is aware or involved. It's only when the requirement is fully approved to be printed in the catalog that it can be considered an official requirement. In the same way that the catalog is published every year, requirements within the degree audit receive a new version every time something changes and those changes are then associated with the catalog year when the change was published and became official. Sometimes program requirements are pretty stable, think English or history. Other disciplines have more frequent changes and updates to the requirements. Think computer science or analytics depending on how the requirements are coded or exist in combination with other requirements. You can end up with a lot of different versions of requirements pretty quickly. This way, students who start in 2020 aren't affected by changes to their program that work their way into the catalog in 2023 right as they're poised to graduate. So now the catalog has been published, the degree audit analyst has created new versions of the requirement blocks that have changed and associated them with the new catalog year and they've taken a pass at coding the new requirements and now a critical step in the process happens a review with the units affected by the requirement changes. This usually involves a meeting or two with the directors of academic advising in a unit to vet the changes and ensure that everything made it through the way it was expected to. This can be an iterative process, especially with complicated requirements with significant other dependencies, developing a positive working relationship with your academic advisors across campus is critical to the success of this process. Maintaining open lines of communication, being responsive and listening for understanding, not just hearing, making the changes and incorporating them into the production environment so that students can actually see them is time bound. It's a good practice. Is it a best practice? What are my other options here? Let's call it a good practice to have the changes made and in production so that students who might be participating in orientations over the summer can see the correct version of their requirements right from the start to accomplish that you don't have to wait until the catalog is actually published to start revising the requirements, coding. You just have to wait until the proposal makes it all the way through the approval process. So your degree audit analysts should be reviewing the minutes from whatever group on your campus is the final approver for curriculum changes. You know, in addition to maybe being involved earlier in the process. It's still always good to read what was actually approved. We've covered a lot of ground so far and I feel like maybe there's more than one episodes worth of information here, but I'm going to press on and cover a couple more topics relating to degree audits. I've mentioned catalog year a lot. I hope not too much. But there are situations when a student's catalog can change. For example, if a student stops attending and has to reapply for admission when they return their catalog year may get bumped to the catalog year in effect when they return, your institution may have policies specifically governing this at Mason. If the student is on an approved leave, their catalog year stays as it was. If they separate and come back, the student gets the new catalog year when they return some disciplines are more restrictive about which catalog year students are pursuing, especially if the student hasn't been continuously enrolled. In an extreme case going the other way. When I was the associate registrar for certification services at Michigan State, the university had a return to learn initiative inviting people in Michigan who had attended Michigan State but left without earning a degree to come back and finish. One of the incentives was that the student could finish out the requirements that were in place when they were originally at the institution. There are some great stories there. So again, another episode, I've basically planned out all of season seven. Just from ideas from this one episode, there are situations when the requirements for a major will change significantly and students themselves will want to pursue the newer set of requirements or the institution will give students the option to pick between the two versions of the requirements that happened to me at GW those situations are usually few and far between and are generally handled as exceptions. Mason has a policy that all of the components of a student's program of study have to be governed by the same catalog year. So undergraduates can't take the general education requirements from one catalog year and the major requirements from a different catalog year. Minors are OK though, for some reason for a minor, the student gets the catalog year requirements when they declare the minor, not when they matriculated at the institution unless obviously they declare the minor in the same term that they matriculate. You got it. OK. Last topic for today, I think degree audits are incredibly data rich and institutions should be using those data to make students lives better improve student outcomes. Increase graduation rates, enable proactive and invasive advising practices. And to streamline administrative processes really doug the degree audit should be doing all of that. Yes, definitely. Yes, an individual degree audit is an incredibly useful tool for an individual student. But a collection of degree audits taken in aggregate can give amazing insights into the way a curriculum plays out in real life. The secret sauce is something I refer to as requirements based reporting requirements based reporting enables one to inquire how many of my juniors haven't met this particular requirement for straightforward requirements. Sure, you can do that already. For those complicated dependency laden requirements, it gets a lot more difficult to get an accurate report without using the degree, audit data requirements based reporting can be used at the program level too for program reviews or curricular reviews. So let's say a department has one of those take three courses from this list of 18 courses and they think they need to offer all of those courses all the time. But the data show that really only nine of the courses have ever been applied to that requirement. What might a department chair or dean be able to do with these kinds of insights? It works for administrative processing too. I am definitely going to have a full episode on the degree clearance process. But as a teaser, it is possible to use the degree audit data to significantly streamline the awarding of a student's degree and by a student, I mean, all of the applied to graduate students in a term and speaking of applying to graduate requirements based reporting should make the graduation application a thing of the past as students register for classes in their final term and those final requirements in the degree audit show up as met using in progress or registered courses. The student should get a notification that they've been applied to graduate in that term. I said before we live in a connected world, we should use those connections to our benefit and to our students benefits. There are a bunch of use cases where degree audit data should be used by the institution. Yes, it takes effort and co ordination and collaboration. But we're registrars, we coordinate, we collaborate. It's what we do. I could talk about degree audits for a long time and I have, but I'll end it here for today. I have so many ideas for future episodes. I hope you'll stick around and listen. And if you're interested in participating in any of the episode ideas I've floated during the past 40 minutes or so, please reach out. Thanks very much for listening. If you're enjoying the podcast, send it on to a friend or a colleague. I appreciate it. Until next time. Drink some water, stretch your legs, smash the patriarchy and be kind to one another. I'm Doug mckenna and this is for the record. All right, aren't affected by changes to their program that work their way into the catalog in 2023. Right? As they're poised to graduate, poised, the secret sauce is something I refer to as poised, poised, poised, poised.