Revision as of 00:44, 21 March 2011

Academic Standing

Academic Standing is the process by which, at the end of each term, a student is assigned an academic standing of honours, probation, ok, and so on.

To be successful, this process has two prerequisites:

• the population of an academic standing table with the rules for academic standing
• entry of a grade for all courses registered in a term (even if that grade is an incomplete)

Academic Standing Support Table

This is edited through Support Table Maintenance, and the table to be edited is AcadStat.

In this table there needs to be a row for every academic standing status that matches every year of study in every program in which students are registered.

Program Year of Study Matching

The program and year of study matching occurs as follows. If there is a match based on degree (or degree is blank), major/first concentration (or that is blank), minor/second concentration (or it is blank) and the gpas being tested are within the correct range, that record will be used. So rules that apply globally to any program and any year of study should be entered with blank degree, conc1, conc2, and yrstdy fields. Rules that apply to any major or minor or year of study within a degree should have the degree filled in, but conc1, conc2, and yrstdy blank. Other combinations can be determined based on this scheme.

Academic Standing Status

The next field to be completed is ACADSTAT. This is the 2 character code and must appear in the Code Table Maintenance for the entry ACDSTAT.

Term GPA and failure limit

The next two fields to be completed are the term GPA fields. These are UPPERGPA and LOWERGPA, which are the boundaries. Care must be taken when entering the values for these fields as they are 3 decimals. It may be that, through other program settings, you are using 2 or even 1 decimal GPAs. If so, you must enter the three decimal values so that they will round correctly for your calculations. If these are not used for calculating a particular academic standing, enter -1.000 for each.

The next field is NUMFAILS, which defines the number of courses that may be failed in a term in that status. If you have a rule that says that any failure places a student on probation, then this should be 0. If it requires 2 failures to land on probation, then the value should be 2. If you have no such rule, then the value should be entered as 99.

List and Weight

LIST is a deprecated field, but defines which group this standing falls in. Generally these are P (for probation), W (for withdrawal), H (for honours) and X (of ok).

WEIGHT is a way of sorting the "badness" of the standing. Honours is 10. Required to withdraw is 1. OK is 5. Other statuses should be assigned using ranges between those. This weighting is used to disambiguate standings when the term GPAs and the Cumulative GPA statuses are different, with the worst being assigned.

Long Name

LONGNAME is used on some reports, such as the statement of results, to print a statement concerning the academic standing that has been calculated if no standing notation has been entered in the term record for this student.

Cumulative GPAs

MAXCGPA and MINCGPA are entered as the term GPA entries above, but it is the student's cumulative GPA that is checked against these. If these are not used for calculating a particular academic standing, enter -1.000 for each.

Running Academic Standing Reports

These reports are run from the Course Results window. There you choose the menu item Reports | Honors/Probation Lists. On selecting that you will be offered the option of simply printing the existing calculations, or doing a new set of calculations. The next window permits you to set the parameters for this calculation.

Options

First you may select the year and term for which calculations are to be done. Normally this is the current term, but there may be come term overlap situations in which it is necessary to change these values. The minumum credits and minimum courses fields allow you to exclude non-credit and part-time students. Both are used in the exclusion, so if you have a program with single large credit courses, you must use the smallest number of courses (likely 1) while using the threshold of the credit load you want included (likely 6 or 9 credits).

It is possible to restrict this process by a course criteria created in the Course Offerings section of CrossRoad. This is very rare, and so should only be used after consultation with Keeler Services.

Update/New

You will next be presented with a dialog that asks whether you would like to update an existing file or create a new one. The first time academic standing is run for a term, you want to create a new file. However, if there are updates to grades and you wish to run this process again it is substantially faster to update the file.

Progress

The program will then pull each matching student into a table, and calculate the term GPA and then the CGPA for each student. This can take some time. Once these are calculated, the matching academic standing is located. An errorbox will appear if no matching standing record is found. This should be corrected and the process rerun.

Report

A report is then produced listing each student with relevant data and a recommended status. Note that this is a report only, and actual changes need to be made by direct entry in each student record. The assumption behind this report is that the person running the report is not the person who finally decides the student's academic status.

There are utilities that automate some of this data entry; you can refer to Academic Standing Related Processes and Reports.