The Registrar's Office unveiled its new Degreeworks online degree audit tool on Monday, allowing Dartmouth students enrolled for the Summer term to preview the new feature. Through the new program, which is available through Banner Student, students can more easily monitor which courses they still need to complete for their degrees, according to College Registrar Meredith Braz.
Degreeworks, which all undergraduates will use beginning Fall term, clearly explains which graduation and distributive requirements students still need to complete. The program will serve as a platform for future enhancements that will allow students to monitor which classes they need to take for specific majors and minors, and will allow students to declare majors and minors online, according to Braz.
Braz described the program as a "much more sophisticated tool" than the old degree audit system, which she said "served a purpose but had limitations." The old program did not list anything about major and minor requirements and provided less clear instructions than the new system, according to Braz.
The new program will allow students to try out "what if" scenarios in which they check to see what requirements they would need to complete if they decided to add a major or minor.
Braz said she hopes the new program will be completely implemented within a year or less. Beginning in the fall, the registrar will begin to work with the individual departments one at a time, starting with the departments producing the most majors, in order to build major requirements into the new system.
Government department administrator Christine Gex said she looks forward to replacing the current system in which students have to have their major cards signed by several people and then filed with the department as well as with the registrar. She added that having to keep track of and file major cards is very labor intensive.
"I think anything would probably be better than what we have now," she said. "I would welcome something online that we could easily access."
Gex said the government department has not yet been contacted about the change to the system.
Government department chair John Carey said he also looks forward to having a system in which students can declare their majors online. Carey described the current system of declaring majors as "anachronistic."
"I've been struck since I came here at the system that we have," he said.
Government is the second-most popular major at the College, trailing only economics, according to the Dartmouth College website.
Under the current system, students have trouble finding the professor whom they would like to sign their cards because the professor may be out of the office or on sabbatical. As a result, students often have to speak with several different professors for advice on their major rather than their one selected major advisor. This system ultimately inhibits advising continuity, Carey said.
The new system could help prevent this problem by allowing students to interact with their advisors, even if one of them is away from campus, Carey said.
One benefit of the old system, however, is that it forces students to come into their professors' offices and talk with them about their academic plans, Carey said, adding that he hopes this level of interaction will continue with the new system.
"When people are in Hanover, I think there's an advantage to stopping by the office," he said. "When the student's in the office you can drill down a little deeper."
Both the Thayer School of Engineering and Dartmouth Medical School will use Degreeworks, and the other graduate programs, including the Tuck School of Business, have the option of using the program if interested.
Over the next year, the registrar will also make changes to the Organizations, Regulations and Courses database so that the online ORC will be more easily searchable and more up-to-date throughout the year, according to Braz. The Registrar's Office is currently finalizing plans with a vendor that supports online course catalogs to revamp the current online ORC.
Administrators at the registrar have not yet decided whether they will continue to print hard copies of the ORC after the online system is implemented during the 2012-2013 academic year.
With the current system, courses listed in the ORC cannot be updated after Summer term, so the ORC is outdated when new courses are added during the year.
Gex said students often complain to her about the discrepancy between course listings in the ORC, which they claim is out of date, and courses listed on the government department website.
The current system posed challenges this year when Professor Dirk Vandewalle's plans changed after his United Nations appointment to help shape post-conflict Libya prevented him from teaching the classes he had planned to teach in the upcoming winter, according to Carey. Although the department eventually found professors to instruct classes at the same level as the classes that Vandewalle had planned to teach, the subject of the classes will be different. The printed ORC will not reflect those changes.
