New Automation in SIS Helps International Students
International students attending UW–Madison on an F-1 or J-1 visa are usually in the United States, studying on our campus, in person. To avoid termination of their visa, they are required to enroll in a full-time course load each semester. If they drop below full-time, we have a SIS process that automatically sets a minimum credit load for students with an F1 or J1 visa status in SIS (12 credits for UGRDs and 8 credits for GRADs), which prevents them from dropping classes below that level. These minimum credit loads can only be reduced if ISS (International Student Services) grants them permission and enters an exception on their behalf into SIS.
However, since we have many international students who are now attending UW–Madison via enrollment in exclusively remote classes, and are therefore remaining outside the US, the requirement that they remain enrolled full-time is not enforced. Since the usual minimum credit loads are automatically applied to anyone that has an F1 or J1 visa in SIS, and the process can’t be programmed to determine whether or not the student is physically within the US, in order to waive that full-time enrollment requirement someone has to enter the required exception. The Office of the Registrar Student Services team did this manually for the nearly 550 international students who were enrolled in UW–Madison courses in the Fall 2020 term while living outside the United States. Since it was a manual process, as the drop deadline was approaching some international students were prevented from dropping courses, even though they should have been allowed to do so. To avoid this confusion for students and the manual update work for Spring 2021, Leslie Gardner developed a mass update process, enabling the automatic updating of almost 350 students who are continuing their UW–Madison enrollment remotely, saving ISS hours of work.