Standard Procedures

There may be times when you need/want to add transfer records into a student plan, particularly when academic plans are necessary early in the student's journey. This will detail how you can do it and when you should consider removing them. If you need to do this often, ask about expanded permissions in Degree Planner to gain quicker access to student records.

Adding records happens in the Student Record of Degree Planner. Use the +Add Course Record link.

Choose Transfer as the Record Type.

You will need to fill in several fields: Course Number, Credits, Grade, Grade Type, Section, Display Grade and Notes.

Fully filled out Temporary Record:

Once proper transfer credit evaluation has happened and the student gets the service indicator noting that transfer credits have been applied, you will need to go into the Student Record again and remove all temporary records manually by clicking on the X on those records and confirming you would like to delete them.

Any plans with those records will also need a look-through to ensure that actual transfer credits applied to all the requirements as expected. Note that the plan will have errors if transfer credits did not apply seamlessly into the plan once temporary records had been removed. This may trigger a conversation with their advisor to fully map out their plan or make a fresh plan with their actual records.

Similar to prerequisite chains, there are some inherent issues with our Support courses their prerequisites. If student placement in MATH is lower than the actual course, but high enough to get them into the support course, they typically can take both simultaneously and if they pass, get credit for the MATH course needed. This is a common occurrence for a course like MATH&146 (Statistics) and its support course MATH46. When Degree Planner builds out for a student with placement into MATH46, but not MATH&146 - it will not automatically add MATH&146 to the plan, nor any other course that is dependent on it in the plan. 

To resolve this, use the prerequisite waiver for the MATH course and rebuild the plan. 

Once the plan has been built out properly, you can manually add the support course they have placement into the plan in the same quarter as the MATH course.

You will need to keep the prerequisite waiver in place under the student registers for the courses. Once they have, Degree Planner will no longer need the waiver and it can be removed, since they were able to get into the course needed.

You have a lot of administrative tools to enable you to waive COL101:

• Mark as Met
• Course Waiver
• Degree Planner milestone

The recommended means is to use the Degree Planner milestone - as it is the most consistent and stable means to permanently waive it for the student across all potential plans.

To use the milestone method:

Go to the Student Record and choose +Add test Result.

It will default to Normal. Input COLLEGE_COL__101 in the Test ID field (exactly) and add a score of 1 in the Test Score field and click the Save button.

Degree Planner will now automatically waive COL101 from any new plan made for the student. If you want it to be applied in a plan that has already populated it, simply remove the course from the Courses tab and Degree Planner will have the milestone waive it instead.

Distribution Requirements in Direct Transfer Degrees are set at a 15 credit minimum per Distribution. But in practice, we actually only require 14 credits in each distribution area. Degree Planner will insist that 15 credits be applied before it will count the requirement as fulfilled. To circumnavigate this, you can input other Degree Planner-specific milestones that will automatically waive 1 credit from a Distribution requirement, using the same method above for COL101.

Here is the list of milestones you can use to make the distribution requirement 14 credits instead of 15. Use text string and score number exactly for it to be applied correctly:

Degree Planner considers credits affiliated with courses sacrosanct. It will always apply all the credits to a requirement and will never split them - they either all count of none of them do. This can create problems in some plans, as we DO allow credits to be split among a variety of requirements if they can be used to get the student closer to graduation. So, we will have to manually change these credits in Degree Planner for them to work properly. You can use the 'edit course record' feature in the Student Record to change what the credit value for any given course is.

A common occurrence would be for students that take two PE courses. We have a 3 credit limit of these courses to count towards DTAs, but each are worth 2 credits. Degree Planner will never allow the 2nd PE course to count, because credits cannot be split, and if they can't, both courses together would violate the rule that caps it at 3 credits. In this instance we would edit one of the PE courses and change the credit number from 2 to 1 to allow Degree Planner to let it count for the final available PE credit.