Timely Degree Completion

Timely Degree Completion

It has become a national scandal: Students study for years, go deeply into debt, and ultimately do not complete a degree.

As professors Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins have written in their excellent book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, the national average is that less than 40% of community college students will ever complete a degree or transfer to a four-year college or university. And the average in urban areas is about 18%. The degree-completion percentages are higher for four-year institutions, but the average there is still a dismal 59%.

The single biggest factor underlying these facts is that college students are presented with almost countless courses and paths to graduation, and the courses are not obviously linked to the graduation paths. So students drift and take courses that do not take them further down any particular path.

Students Have Questions; Conclusive Systems’ Degree Audits Provide Answers

Conclusive Systems’ Advisor degree audit system will enable your students to find a track, stay on track, and graduate on time! Advisor is designed to be the hub of your entire advising process, as it enables students to choose a major and then see exactly what they need to do to graduate, as well as plan and track their progress toward timely graduation.

For Your Students

Features Students Love

The Advisor system is so ridiculously fast that students can instantly see how their coursework maps onto their selected major. Students can try out unlimited “what if” majors and instantly compare how their courses fit into those possibilities.

Advisor’s degree audits are not “flat reports.” They are interactive applications in which students can move their courses around the audit (into allowable positions) to emphasize completion of particular sections rather than the “overall satisfaction” that the audit engine is seeking.

Directly from an audit, a student can plan and schedule (and even register for) courses that will satisfy particular degree requirements, and the results of their planning/scheduling activities instantly appear on the audit.

Students can communicate with their advisor(s) directly from the audit as well, sharing particular audits and asking questions in the integrated Communicator window. So, the audit itself acts as the hub of communication between a student and an advisor.

Advisor’s degree audits encourage students to self-advise, making communications with an advisor most information-laden and productive.

Advisor enables students to click a single button and get a ranked list of how close they are to completing each of the possible majors in their catalog year/term. They can immediately see the particular courses they must take to complete any of those majors, and they can view the degree audits of the majors that interest them to see in detail how their present and planned coursework maps onto each of those alternative paths to graduation.

Advisor’s Communicator module enables students to share particular degree audits and engage in ongoing dialog with their advisors.

For Your Advisors

Features Advisors and Administrators Love

The Advisor system is so ridiculously fast that advisors can instantly see how their students’ coursework maps onto their selected majors. Advisors can work with their students to try out unlimited “what if” majors and instantly compare how their students’ courses fit into those possibilities.

Advisor’s degree audits are not “flat reports.” They are interactive applications that enable advisors to help their students see what degree paths are best-fits, as well as help their students plan/schedule (and even register for) courses to efficiently stay on track to graduation.

Often a particular degree requirement needs advisor-approval for a student to apply a particular course to that requirement. Advisor’s interactive audit makes it easy for an advisor to select student courses and apply them to such a requirement.

Many schools allow advisors to apply substitutions and waivers for their students. Advisor makes it trivially easy for advisors to make these changes directly on a student’s audit.

Advisor provides a wide range of reports that enable to advisors and administrators to track students and course need. For example:

  • Scheduling Report — Shows a ranked, weighted list of the courses students need to take in order to graduate, ranked by need. This report helps you to know what courses you should be offering in upcoming terms.
  • Predictive Report — Shows the courses students plan to take in upcoming terms. Together with the Scheduling report, you get very accurate and fine-grained insight into what courses/sections (and even how many sections) you should be offering in upcoming terms.
  • Financial Aid Report — Shows term-by-term details about what students are trying to accomplish and how effective they are in their efforts. This report shows courses that are non-degree-applicable and why such courses were not degree-applicable.  Not only is this report invaluable for institutional reporting, but it helps you identify at-risk and drifting students.
  • Program Completion Report — Like the comparable report that individual students can use, this report shows you how close a given set of students are to completing every degree/major you offer or a particular degree/major. The report also shows exactly what required courses students are lacking.
  • And more. Advisor excels at analytics.

Advisor’s Communicator module enables advisors to view and share particular degree audits and engage in ongoing dialog with their students.
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