Over the last twenty years, many colleges and departments have awarded credentials to students who have focused on areas of study beyond the defined major. Unfortunately, the limitations of the current student information system have made it impossible to track these credentials over time. Based on work completed at the end of a given student’s career, colleges and departments have awarded credentials as official “notes.”
Since there has never been a need to systematically define credentials beyond majors, common definitions have never been established. Depending on a student’s given college and department, he or she may be awarded a minor, concentration, or option for academic work completed beyond his or her major requirements. Tracking of these credentials has been a long-term desire of the colleges. Since these credentials have been only centrally tracked through notes, it has been impossible to gather any statistics on the number of minors, concentrations, and options awarded over the years.
There are many ways to track credentials. However, the most difficult aspect of providing this capability is defining credentials other than the major. Although minor, concentration, and options are ubiquitous across the University, the definitions of what these represent are not common throughout academic units. This makes administrative tasks, such as applying business rules and gathering statistics, difficult. In order to set up credentials so that they can be awarded, reported, and tracked in the future, a common definition needs to be derived.
When defining academic credentials two criteria must be met:
This definition is pertains to undergraduate minors, majors, concentration and specializations.
Based on these criteria, there are four types of credentials defined:
Within the academic structure, credentials fall within two categories: academic plans and academic subplans.
Academic plans are associated to a student’s record based on the student’s academic program or academic career. Academic plans can be defined to carry a degree.
Academic sub-plans are associated to a student’s record based on the student’s academic plans. Academic sub-plans cannot carry a degree.
Depending on the career offering a given credential, the same credential can be an academic plan in one career and an academic sub-plan in a different career. Academic structures in the graduate school offer an extreme example of this duplicity. Any graduate student is able to study in any defined credential (with a few exceptions). To reflect this, all minors and concentrations are set up as academic plans linked to the graduate academic career. Other credentials especially those in the undergraduate career, are tied to the student’s college (program) or major (academic plan).
Major – an area of study where successful completion is awarded with a degree or certification.
In order to study for a particular major, a student must apply and be admitted to an academic program
offering that particular major. For this reason, majors are represented as academic plans associated directly
to an academic program.
Minor – a concentrated area of study outside one’s major area of study.
Minors can be offered only to students within a particular academic program, or to students within one career. For this reason, minors set up as academic plans can be associated directly to one academic program or to one particular career. Although most minors are offered to a defined group of students within a career, it is recommended that they be set up based on a career. If a minor were to be defined to a particular program, and, in the future, a student from a different program were to be allowed to study for this minor, multiple academic plan codes would need to be created to represent the addition of this one minor within the academic structure. Having multiple codes represent this minor would mean that any statistics generated would have to take both codes into account. If a college does processing based on a minor code, all processing setup would need to include both codes. Associating all minors to an academic career would provide maximum flexibility. Since students would not be able to declare minors through self-service, an administrator would be required to associate the academic plan to students’ records. A person, rather than the system, would enforce application and awarding procedures.
Concentration – a focused area of study within one’s major.
Concentrations are defined as academic sub-plans for the undergraduate career. All academic sub-plans
must be linked to an academic plan. Any student wishing to have an academic sub-plan on his or her
record must have the associated academic plan.
Specialization – a period of short-time specialized study.
There are numerous opportunities across the University for students to participate in specialized studies for
a short period of time. Specializations can be defined as an academic plan or an academic sub-plan.
When defining academic plans and academic sub-plans, the essential questions to answer are obviously: “Who is able to participate?,” “How may academic advising be set up?,” and “How would you like students in these plans and sub-plans to be reported?” Another important consideration is how tuition will be determined. Short-term programs that are set up as Specializations may need secondary criteria for tuition calculation. Determining term-based criteria is less obvious because of the short-term nature of Specializations and the way in which academic plans and sub-plans are tracked.
Any minors, concentrations, and options awarded as official notes in SIS (Student Information Systems) will be converted to official notes for transcript production. Credentials will not be reflected as academic plans or academic sub-plans for historical records.