Two Northwestern students tested a degree auditing system for economics majors Friday in one of the first steps toward implementing a permanent system in which all students would be able to track their degree requirements through CAESAR.
The system showed students credits they have completed toward their major as well as requirements they still need to graduate.
“I think it’s really helpful when you’re trying to either alter your major or you want to see how far you’re going in getting the degree, especially for seniors,” said Lipton Li, a Weinberg sophomore who tested the system.
The Office of the Registrar received university approval for the system’s budget in Spring Quarter. The office hired two staff members and a part-time consultant to install the system.
University Registrar Suzanne Anderson said she hopes to have a system available by June for all students in the Weinberg College of Arts and McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
“Those are the two schools that showed the most significant interest and those are the two larger schools,” she said.
All six undergraduate schools eventually will be able to use the degree auditing system, she said. The registrar will work on getting these systems implemented during the summer. Additional hardware will be installed on the system as extra majors are added.
The system initially will start with several degree programs from McCormick and Weinberg, including economics, the first system to be tested. Anderson said the office tested economics auditing first because of its “fairly straightforward” requirements and the large number of students involved in the program.
“If a major is very loosely configured, it’s very difficult to put that into a computer,” she said. “You have to have some fairly defined requirements, and some majors are easier to do than others.”
The registrar will add software incrementally and hopes to have the first few majors on CAESAR for use by all students by some time Winter Quarter.
Matt McCormick, a Weinberg sophomore who tested the system along with Li, said the system was beneficial despite taking more than a minute to present degree requirements.
“It’s easy for an adviser to overlook obscure requirements or possible substitutions,” McCormick said. “This makes it all very clear.”
Anderson said she hopes students eventually will be able to see how they can apply their current credits to other majors, a tool Li said would be particularly beneficial.
“When a freshman is still trying to figure out what (major) they want, especially after several quarters and they want to see what an economics major requires,” it will help, he said.
The registrar used to have a degree auditing system for Weinberg students, but administrators said the system often produced either outdated or incorrect information. The system was shut down in 1996 because it was not Y2K compliant.
Student leaders have pushed for a degree auditing system since Winter Quarter, when Associated Student Government senators passed a bill calling for such a system to be put on CAESAR.
“The students are the ones who asked for it, so we’re meeting the students’ request and I think it will be a useful tool,” Anderson said.
