Improving Academic Standing Reporting
With the upgrade to the 9.2 environment in SIS many upgrades and enhancements occurred, and are still occurring. For instance, when the university transitioned to using the delivered transcript in SIS 9.2, an associated decision was made to align with AACRAO best practices to consistently and permanently display academic standing on the transcript. The enhancement not only ensures consistency with AACRAO practices, but also with peer institutions.
Since moving to this permanent display however, it has come-to-light that some of the academic standing descriptions carried forward from the old transcript are not easily understandable to external entities. In some cases this language can even seem punitive to students and does not accurately convey whether the student is in good academic standing.
The Office of the Registrar has been engaging actively with AAPL (Academic Advising and Policy Leaders) for the past 15 months to review the issues in the presentation of legacy academic actions displayed on the delivered transcript. And over the past nine months RO staff have been working closely and reviewing the code in the academic standing process and mapping it to detailed business process documentation that hasn’t previously existed. During this time every school’s rules, as enforced in SIS, were reviewed with school/college (S/C) leadership.
From this collaboration, school/college partners have reported that they’ve been able to better understand their policies, while the RO was able to strengthen our relationships with these campus leaders, develop documentation to aid in troubleshooting, and deepen our understanding of processes across campus. As a result of all of this hard work and continuous collaboration, there is affirmation of alignment between the recorded business processes and S/C policies.
Moving forward, the RO is working to implement changes to the academic standing display on the transcript to be more student friendly and accurately represent the students’ academic status at the end of the term. The benefit of this project is not only the outcome of improved language on transcripts, but also strengthened communication and partnership across campus.