Inside Iowa State

October 8, 2004

DARwin to take on degree auditing process

by Linda Charles

The buzz around the registrar and admissions offices is DARwin, a software program that tracks students' progress toward their degrees.

The original program, DARS (Degree Audit Reporting System), was developed at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. The most recent version, DARwin, can be run on PCs and used on the Web. More than 250 colleges and universities are using some version of the DARS program.

Once it's fully operational, said Laura Doering, associate registrar, checking on a student's progress toward a degree will be as easy as signing onto AccessPlus. The program will save significant staff time by automating tasks that staff across campus currently must do manually.

Shopping for courses

In the future, students will be able to "shop" for courses to see how they would apply toward degree requirements. "It's going to be very, very cool," Doering said of the online DARwin program. "It will have shopping carts, like eBay, and be very graphic."

Students will be able to access their degree programs online, 24-7. Advisers will be able to do the same as they help students plan what courses to take. Potential transfer students will be able to see how the courses they took elsewhere apply toward an Iowa State degree.

All that, however, is a ways off, Doering said. Information on all degrees must be coded and entered into the program and tests performed before the new system is operational. Initially, DARwin will generate printed copies only. Web capability will be added later.

Tests this fall

Deanna Jordan, program coordinator with records and registration, said DARwin was tested in the colleges of Business and Design last spring semester and this semester. Approximately 6,500 students in the colleges of Business, Design, Education and Vet Med, and in the psychology department may use DARwin-generated degree audits as they plan their classes for spring semester. (It's the college's decision whether to distribute the DARS audits. The current system continues to be the official audit while DARS is in a pilot test phase.) The university will continue to run parallel systems until DARwin is completely functional.

The university's current auditing system is antiquated and can't be updated efficiently or expanded, Doering noted.

Currently, students receive copies, twice a year, of their degree audits showing their progress toward degree completion. Special requests for copies of degree audits -- whether from students, advisers or college classification officers -- are run only once a week.

Much of the checking of curricular rules has to be done manually now, Jordan said. For example, some courses, when taken with other courses, can't be counted toward graduation requirements (e.g. either Math 104 or 105 can be counted toward a degree program, but not both). Currently, degree audit evaluators in the Office of the Registrar have to look at every audit and watch for these "can't use together" course combinations.

More efficient

All that will change when DARwin is put into production. DARwin will be able to check the courses students take against any catalog, manage course number changes from one catalog to the next, check for courses that cannot be used together and compare what students have taken with any unit's curricular rules. Plus, degree audit progress reports can be printed daily, Jordan said.

DARwin also will be able to handle transfer articulation (determining how credits taken at another institution transfer to Iowa State), said Lee Furbeck, associate director of transfer admissions. The big benefit will be in time savings and getting the results back to potential students more quickly.

"The new system is going to be much more efficient," Doering said. "It can be used as an advising tool, graduation approval tool and as a transfer articulation module. We're on the way and we're all excited about it."

A new software program to track students' progress toward their degrees, DARwin, will save a significant amount of staff time. Eventually, the program will allow students to access their degree programs online, 24-7. Advisers will be able to do the same as they help students plan what courses to take. Potential transfer students will be able to see how the courses they took elsewhere apply toward an Iowa State degree.