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Press Coverage
Advisor was covered in an edition of the Greentree Gazette . The higher-ed business publication's discussion of degree audit systems identified Advisor as one of "two niche products [that] appear to dominate this specialty."

The basis of a degree audit is a hierarchical representation of a student's degree requirements. Courses the student has taken are intelligently applied to the requirements, and each requirement is marked "Satisfied" with a green checkmark, or "Unsatisfied" with a red X. Requirements are described in plain language, and the student is shown what options are available to meet them. Courses that were not applied to the degree are listed beneath the audit. Audits are Web-based, SSL secured, highly interactive, and compatible with modern major browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Opera.

Sample Audit

The Advisor Appliance can produce multiple audits per second. This means that students can run audits on demand at all times of day, advisors can create audits on students when they have time, and registrars can complete large batch audits quickly. Audit creation is so brief that it is virtually unnoticeable against the backdrop of standard Web page download times. The sheer speed of Advisor audits is one of their most important usability features; when it's truly instant, people just use it more.

Flexible audit display controls allow you to expand or collapse individual requirements, collapse all satisfied requirements with a single click, and add outline numbers for easy collaboration. Course options can be shown with varying levels of detail, or hidden completely. When a user action causes the page to reload, a link is provided to jump directly back to the part of the audit that was being viewed. All of this adds up to a web-based audit that is very convenient to work with, and which can be customized to show just what a user wishes to see at a given moment.

If you want to see a course applied somewhere else, move it! The course moving feature allows users to place a course into any allowable position on the audit. Other courses will automatically be reshuffled to accommodate the change or to take advantage of new satisfaction possibilities. Custom course movements are stored as preferences of the user who created them, and are automatically applied to future audits run against the same degree by that user. Custom movements are always noted at the top of the audit and can be canceled at any time. Students are only allowed to move courses into positions that are already allowed by your degree requirements.

In addition to a student's declared academic goal, users may create new academic goals to explore alternative degree options for the student. For example, a student might want to see what changing her major would do to her overall degree progress. Alternative academic goals are not just one-time events; they can be saved for later use, be given custom names, and are automatically shared with any advisors or registrars who have access to that student.

For each academic goal, students can create an academic plan by indicating which courses they intend to take to fulfill their degree requirements. These courses are displayed on future audits immediately beneath the courses that have already been applied to the requirement. Students can also add the term in which they plan to take the course, the number of credits they plan to take it for, and the grade they expect to receive, all of which may help them determine the best location for the course. Planned courses can even be applied to the audit as if they were already completed, as described in the next section.

In addition to seeing already-completed courses applied to a degree, users can elect to include courses with various incomplete statuses. Except for planned courses, which are always an option, these statuses are fully customizable to the needs of your school. You have full control over what statuses are included by default and which can be selected as an option. When a user elects to include incomplete courses in the audit they see what their degree progress will be like when those courses are completed. When combined with academic plans, this powerful tool enables students to plan an entire path to degree completion and see its effects.

Sometimes exceptions need to be made to your degree requirements for a particular student. This can be accomplished directly from the audit interface by a privileged user such as a registrar. Exceptions can be made that force or deny a particular course application, allow a course to be re-used toward additional requirements, force the satisfaction or unsatisfaction of a requirement, edit numeric features of a requirement, or remove requirements altogether. Exceptions are marked on the audit with a distinct color and provide descriptive details about themselves, including custom comments.

All users can save audits and can give them custom names. In addition, the two most recent audits that a user has run on a student are always available. Audits saved for later viewing remain fully interactive. By default, students have access only to audits they have run on themselves. Privileged users, such as advisors and registrars, have access to all audits run on their students by any user.

Degree audits can be exported to the ubiquitous Adobe® PDF format for easy and accurate printing, saving to local machines, advisement collaboration, and sharing with parents or friends via e-mail. Exported PDF's are full-color and reflect any custom view settings in effect on an audit at the time of export. This is also a great multi-platform format; PDF viewers exist for every major computing platform including Windows®, Linux®, and MacOS®.

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