Summary
This article will detail the features available to administrative users of Degree Planner, including comments, plan deletion and plan approval-related buttons. It will provide context and use cases for features on the Requirements tab, including marked as met and viewing options to shift course requirement usage. It will describe how to change, delete and add items into the student record.
Before you begin
This article is intended for Shoreline Staff ONLY. Most students and many other staff members will not have access to administrative features, so this article will likely not prove helpful to understanding or using Degree Planner. If you are not an administrator for Degree Planner or do not have access to view or change student plans, please use the link to learn about Degree Planner for students. This article also assumes you have some familiarity with Degree Planner, so it will not be replicating information provided in the Knowledge Base articles for students, instead supplementing it with the additional powers granted to administrators for Degree Planner. If you do not have familiarity or need a refresher, the link is also a useful resource for you to explore before continuing with this article.
Knowledge Base: Degree Planner for Students
Expanded Menu Options
When viewing a student plan, you will see you have several more menu options over what students encounter in Degree Planner.
Student View:
Administrator View:
Approve Plan
You can Approve a plan - use this link to learn more about the approval process: Plan Approval.
Return Plan
From the More menu, you see a Return Plan button - use this link to learn more about what returning a plan means as part of the approval process: Plan Approval.
Delete Plan
You can delete plans, but be very careful, as this is a permanent process.
You should only delete plans that you have made or that you are sure need to be deleted. It can be helpful when clearing out clutter in Degree Planner, since students can see all plans made for them and numerous or broken plans could lead to confusion. If a plan has been approved, it will always populate on the top of the list of plans. Since students cannot delete plans on their own, student-made plans can also be deleted upon their request. You can see who built a plan and when by looking at the plan history from the More menu.
Comments
You can also add comments to the Course Tab of the plan - this can be especially useful when wanting to leave information about the plan for others to see, including the student or other staff members.
Comments will appear on the right side of the page in the Courses tab, with the comment, person, date and time of the comment(s).
The plan history will also have various comments around approval and exception items that have happened to the plan over time.
Expanded Requirement Tab Features
In the requirements tab there are a couple of new features available: mark as met and view options.
Marked as met
You can use this feature to exempt a student from a requirement by marking it as met.
It comes with the ability to leave comments about why this requirement was exempted.
Which can be seen in the plan history.
You can also easily reverse marked as met requirements, again with the option to leave comments about the action.
But marked as met comes with some serious limitations. It will only work for the plan it is marked in, not all plans associated with the student. Single course requirements can be marked as met easily, like above, but electives, and especially larger elective buckets are difficult to mark as met.
First, you must remove any elective placeholder(s) from the plan, by clicking X on the placeholder.
This will often cause errors or could trigger minimum credit requirements to populate inside the plan.
Only after they are removed from the Courses tab can you go back to the Requirements tab and see the option to mark the elective as marked as met.
This also only works for the ENTIRE elective set - so if a student has partially met the elective set, it cannot work at all, and you cannot mark part of the elective set as met - it is all or nothing.
For example, if a student has met 10 of their 15 credit Social Science requirements, the last 5 credits won't be able to be mark as met. Only if the student had no Social Science credits and you wanted to mark all those credits as marked as met, could you do it.
This leads to the other limitation - minimum credit requirements. Just because you have marked some credits as met, it will not apply those credits against the minimum credit requirement, which because it is considered a large elective bucket, cannot itself be used for marked as met. This means that in plans with credits needed to meet the minimum credit requirement will be flagged with errors and could even have minimum credit placeholders forced into the plan to make up the credits needed from the marked as met credit.
Please refer to the standard procedures article [link] to see more information about when to use marked as met.
View Options
Typically, Degree Planner is designed to assign credits coming from the student record in increasingly large elective buckets. This means Degree Planner, when looking to use a course to satisfy a elective requirement, will work its way down the Priority Map, starting with the narrowest bucket options first and increasing the bucket size as it tries to find a place where the credit will count. For example, a standard order Degree Planner will use when evaluating a credit from the student record, it will first check if it can satisfy a Multicultural Understanding credit (with 12 courses listed), if it cannot, it will go to a Social Science credit (with 138 courses listed), if it cannot, it will go the a general elective credit (with 1687 courses listed), as so on.
As students have credits apply to their plans, you will see them in the Requirements tab with the grade and quarter they earned the requirement or shows when a course has been planned. Sometimes it will also display a link to view options. This means that Degree Planner or a person working on the plan assigned the course to count towards one elective requirement, but it could be used to satisfy another requirement.
Clicking View Options will provide you with a list of elective options this course could count towards instead.
This is useful when fine-tuning some student plans, freeing credits from one area and applying them to another area. Typically, Degree Planner has done its best to optimize the plan by applying courses and credits to get the student closer to completion, but occasionally it or people working on plans can make a less-than-ideal course assignment. View Options allows you to shift courses around to find an optimal path for the student to take. Degree Planner will automatically shift courses around and recalculate the course assignments to adjust for the new assignment you have provided.
Expanded Student Record Options
Within the Student Record, from the More menu, administrative permissions allow you to change, add and delete any aspect of the student record, and thereby how Degree Planner uses them. However, some changes you make will only be temporary. For example, attempting to delete existing completed, active or registered courses will only work for a day. Once the daily data upload happens, which will still include the course you deleted, it will repopulate back into the student record. Other changes can be more lasting, depending on multiple factors of what you are changing.
Adding a Course Record
Normal Record
This entry should not be used - primarily because it requires the most fields and is most likely to get overridden by incoming data.
Transfer Record
This is what is used to represent student records that have yet to be officially entered into ctcLink through transcript evaluation. This is where temporary records can be entered. More about Temporary records can be learned here: Standard Procedures.
Course Waiver
This is an alternate means to waive a course requirement in Degree Planner. It will waive the course identified across all plans for the student - effectively waiving the course for every plan, whether the course is required or not. Simply add the course number without spaces and press the save button.
Like marked as met, there is the ability to leave a note about the course waiver, but unlike marked as met, it is hidden in the details of the course. Only opening the course in the student record will display the note details, and nothing will populate in plan history about it. Deleting the waiver will delete all aspects of it, note and all. Students will also not be notified about the waiver anywhere in the plan, except as a line item in the Requirements tab, which is marked as temporarily waived - because it could be deleted without warning.
Adding a Test Result
Normal
This is the final method to waive some requirements for the student. Normally you would not need to add test results here - they get added when they are inputted into ctcLink and are part of the next day's data uploads. However, you can directly add milestones into the student record, and since multiple identical milestones do not interfere with Degree Planner functionality, you can choose to add them for immediate effect in plans. There is a set of Degree Planner-specific milestones that can help troubleshoot specific issues. One such milestone is a COL101 milestone - entering COLLEGE_COL__101 with a score of 1 into the student record and save, and it will automatically waive the COL101 requirement from all current and future plans. This is the recommended means to waive the COL101 requirement.
Prerequisite Waiver
Also very helpful - as it will remove the prerequisite from any course in Degree Planner. Some students will require this intervention for plans to properly build out for them. You choose Prereq Waiver from the drop-down menu, type the course number (no spaces) into the waiver field and save. You can learn more about when to use the prerequisite waiver here: Standard Procedures.
Prerequisite Group
Not in use - you can ignore entirely.
Changing a Course Record or Test Result
Don't do it, unless it is a record you have created, or is subject to credit splitting found here: Standard Procedures.
Deleting a Course Record or Test Result
Don't do it, unless it is a record you have created.
Support Options
If you run into a problem using Degree Planner, use the link to file a ticket for support:
Starfish Support: Degree Planner Platform
You can also find more articles about Degree Planner and how to build plans using the link:
Knowledge Base: Degree Planner for Students