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Registrar's Office Annual Report

Registrar's Office Annual Report 2010-2011

The Office of the Registrar maintains the permanent academic record and provides services for Arts and Sciences students, faculty, and staff at Dartmouth in the areas of academic policy, enrollment and course information.

What do we do?

Course election, registration, class scheduling, major and minor declaration, grade processing, Catalog (ORC) production, graduation support, academic transcript delivery, and student enrollment management.

AND we also:

• maintain, preserve, and disseminate students’ official academic records
• develop and publish the academic calendar
• provide guidance about the academic curriculum
• act as a central academic information source for the College

We:

• manage on-line course assessment and reporting
• certify Veterans
• oversee student enrollment patterns and "D"-Plans
• manage Faculty elections to committees
• review student academic petitions for exceptions to faculty policies
• administer support for students who study off-campus while on a leave term
• support transfer students and manage the transfer credit process

In addition we:

• report enrollment to the National Student Clearinghouse to support financial aid and student loans
• provide Degree and Enrollment verification support for students
• provide Apostille notarization for international recognition of credentials
• manage Banner (student system) processes and security access
• train and support Department/Program Administrators on course and course system management
• assist with First-year seminar and Writing 5 enrollments

And lastly, we:

• lead internal, cross-divisional and institution-wide projects
• provide reporting services to UG Arts and Sciences Faculty and the Dean of the Faculty Office
• support the Dean of Faculty as a member of the Wentworth Associate Deans group
• participate in numerous Faculty and ad hoc committees
• comply with and educate the campus about Federal, State, and Institutional legislation
• provide consulting for the American University of Kuwait

 

Risks and Challenges

Risks were mitigated significantly this year with the implementation of the new course election system. They continue, however, to include some outdated systems supporting major functions which, if they were to fail, would have widespread and significant consequences. The most significant risk, the academic transcript, is slated to be addressed this year.

Challenges include the overload of projects requiring our attention, and staff changes. These staff changes have occurred not only in our office, but in key partner offices such as the Dean of the Faculty and Dean of the College. With change comes opportunity, however also background and context are lost, so education is required. We are also challenged by the quantity and multiplicity of our tasks while trying to improve basic Registrarial functions as our many constituents demand more, and our peers move forward.

Despite these challenges, we have built a strong team and have had many significant successes this year.

 

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND PLANS:

Two major accomplishments

1. We implemented a new course election system! Key improvements include:
   • We preserved Dartmouth’s customized prioritization system and open election of courses, valued by Faculty, while central IT provides ongoing technical support; we reduced the risk to a significant process.
   • Instead of 5 days, the processing of course priorities now takes less than 10 minutes!! Banner prerequisite checking was enabled; prerequisites are now checked by Banner *before* the student may register for the course.
   • All permissions to gain entry into courses are now granted online by faculty or their proxies – no longer must paper cards be signed by faculty and hand-delivered by students to the Registrar’s Office.
   • Students may now add and drop all of their courses online and do not have to come to the Registrar's Office to add or drop certain courses, eliminating long lines.
     
     
2. Faculty passed legislation to change the calendar and end Fall Term by Thanksgiving starting fall 2012.
   • This was a two year project led by the Registrar in partnership with the Dean of Faculty and the Committee on Instruction.
   • It involved multiple meetings and input from administrative offices as well as faculty committees to arrive at this conclusion. It has campus-wide impact and requires numerous adjustments to support the change.

Additional Accomplishments

• We completed several projects with support from Administrative Computing. Our goal is to move off dependency on True Basic code and the VMS machine, improve our use of Banner, and to provide more services using current technologies.
  1. Participated in two major upgrades to Banner 8 and Oracle 11g, testing the multiple areas in STUDENT used by the Registrar's Office.
  2. Partnered with several offices on a workflow project to "cancel enrollment" for students who decide to not attend Dartmouth after accepting.
  3. Did all of the coding and preparation required to implement "Degree Works," the new, greatly improved degree audit system for students. It will first be made available as "D-Track" in August 2011.
  4. Partnered with the Dean of the College to learn about the credits and exemptions process.
  5. Represented the student records perspective on the campus-wide "Identity Management" project.
  6. Implemented an online tool so that students may now make D-plan changes on-line rather than having to come into the Registrar's office.
  7. Identified a vendor with whom we will partner to offer a fully developed, searchable and integrated online ORC beginning fall 2011.
  8. Ran the Faculty Balloting process using a new, online system for management of the elections and tallying results.
  9. Upgraded the Registrar’s Office to Microsoft Office 2010 in preparation for the Blitz-to-Blitz project
  10. Helped with the Dean of Faculty Tenure Names project to provide an improved way for gathering feedback from students to support the tenure process.
  11. Implemented new fees approved last year which included a major increase in the transfer term fee from $25 to $1100 which caused significant negative reaction.

 

• Planned for 2011-12:
  1. Major re-write of the transcript to improve and stabilize the technology supporting it, allow for PDF transcript delivery, and allow for students and alumni to order transcripts online.
  2. "D-CARS" – Dartmouth Course Approval Routing System. Development of an online tool for faculty to submit new courses online for approvals eliminating a cumbersome paper system.
  3. "D-Track" - implementation (Degree Works) – roll-out initial phase to students in August 2011 and begin working with departments and programs to add major information (Phase 2) starting fall 2011.
  4. Online major declaration – allow students to declare their majors online rather than requiring them to use the current 3 card system, and integrate new tool with Degree Works.
  5. Enrollment verifications online – allow students to use the services of the National Student Clearinghouse to get free, self-service online enrollment verifications.
  6. Permit students to do all their address changes online instead of having to come to the Registrar's office to request changes to certain address types.
  7. Work with the Dean of Faculty and the Dean's Advisory Committee to provide enhanced reporting for course assessment.
  8. Provide technical support as required for the Campus-wide Advising initiative.
  9. Move the Registrar Report on Grades from reliance on True Basic to a data warehouse structure for improved reporting.

 

SERVICE IMPROVEMENTS

1. We continued our focus on a "one-stop" service model to better address student needs.
2. Re-engineered multiple processes to improve efficiency and delivery of service. For example we placed a simple shelf stocked with various forms outside the office which made them available when we are closed, which was extremely well-received by students.
3. Provided extensive online guides for students, faculty, and department/program administrators explaining the new course registration process.
4. Provided several hands-on training sessions for department/program administrators so that they could master the new registration and prerequisite checking process and support their areas.
5. Established a weekly customer service "tip of the week" for discussion at the staff meeting to improve front line service.
   
   

Planned for 2011-12:

1. Transfer student "credit review day" offered where Department/Program Chairs are invited to review the transcripts of incoming transfer students and offer us evaluation feedback.
2. Redesign of Registrar website, in partnership with Web Services, to improve information and navigation.
3. Enhance the section to the web on leave term off-campus study to provide more self-service information to students.
4. Continue participation in the campus-wide "Mobile Dartmouth" group which will likely result in one or more student "mobile apps" that will make Registrar-related services more available to our constituents.
5. Develop a Chairs Handbook with guidance for new Department/Program Chairs on issues that involve the Registrar's Office.

 

STAFFING

1. Newly hired staff hired brought a variety of needed skill sets and characteristics to the Registrar team.
2. Engaged in extensive staff cross-training to ensure that existing staff could improve their skills.
3. Successfully hired several well-qualified student workers to supplement the workforce which allowed the staff to engage in higher level tasks.

 

Planned for 2011-12:

1. Continue, when additional staffing is required, to seek a diverse staff that are flexible, technically inclined, personable, and perform tasks with a high degree of accuracy.
2. Continue to assess and improve staff skill sets, evaluate and re-engineer tasks and to streamline processes.
3. Establish self-service online standard reports for academic departments/programs.
4. Continue staff training on service, technology, process management.

 

COMMITTEE WORK - Registrar

Continued to work with multiple committees which include:

• Committee of Chairs
• Committee on Instruction
• Committee on Withdrawals
• Enrollment Committee
• Campus Planning Committee
• Classroom Subcommittee
• Computing Oversight Committee – Chair
• Dartmouth Information Security Council
• Dartmouth Registrar’s Committee – Chair
• Calendar Committee
• Dartmouth Mobile Systems Committee
• Language Waiver Committee
• Committee on Student Life
• Multiple ad hoc committees

 

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT - Registrar

• AACRAO – American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Appointed to national Public Policy Committee.
• AACRAO 96th Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA. Presenter.
• AACRAO –Nominated Vice President for Leadership and Management Development and President-Elect, 2011.
• NEACRAO – New England Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Executive Council. Also presenter at 63rd Annual Meeting, Newport, RI
• IVY Registrar's Annual Meeting, Princeton, NJ – attendee
• 12-College Exchange Registrar's Annual Meeting, Amherst, MA - attendee

 

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT – Associate/Assistant Registrars

• NEBUG (New England Banner Users Group), Durham, NH (1 attendee)
• Degree Works Symposium, Seattle, WA (2 attendees)
• AACRAO Registrar 101 – online/pre-conference course (2 staff participants)
• AACRAO 96th Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA. Presenters. (2 staff presented; 1 staff committee member; 1 attendee)
• NEACRAO 63rd Annual Meeting, Newport, RI. Presenters. (2 staff presented; 2 staff committee members)

 

Some Data on our operations

In the past year the Registrar’s Office Staff:

• Processed 16,561 official transcripts from Banner (plus 297 more from pre-Banner records)
  
  

Academic Year	Banner Transcripts	Pre-Banner Transcripts
2009	19,159	~300
2010	17,245	~300
2011	16,561	297


Unofficial Transcripts were made available to students in December of 2009, which likely helped to decrease the overall transcript volume.


• Produced approximately 4,000 "non-transcripts"
  
  
• Managed 5,692 D-Plan term changes
  
  
  

	Academic Year
	2009	2010	2011
Manual Changes	4,574	4,944	4,218
Online Changes	0	0	1,474
Total	4,574	4,944	5,692


D-Plan changes were made available to students online in November of 2010; however, there are still a large volume of changes that must be made manually.

• Managed the submission of 39,609 grades



Term	Entered Online	Total Grades	Percentage Online
201006	2,151	3,168	68%
201009	10,931	12,927	85%
201101	10,909	11,794	92%
201103	11,310	11,720	97%
Total	35,301	39,609	89%

• Online Grade Entry from Summer 2009 - Spring 2011





 

• Processed 4,373 in-office registration actions (e.g. add/drop):



Term	Academic Year
	2009	2010	2011
Summer	244	420	374
Fall	1,956	2,128	2,292
Winter	1,399	1,736	1,622
Spring	1,842	1,915	85
Total	5,441	6,199	4,373


New Course Election system implemented for Spring 2011 election and add/drop resulted in a dramatic drop in in-office registration actions.

• Scheduled 2,086 courses:



Term	Academic Year
	2009	2010	2011
Summer	242	249	250
Fall	589	608	592
Winter	614	601	612
Spring	635	627	632
Total	2,080	2,085	2,086


Counts all courses built for a term, regardless of enrollment or later cancellations.

• Reviewed and processed 1,064 student petitions to the Registrar



Petition Type	Petition Count
Change in Grade	150
Add Course After Deadline	93
Drop Course After Deadline	38
Additional 2-Course Load	40
Additional 4-Course Load	27
Unlimited 2-Course Load	5
NRO After Deadline	5
NRO Grade Chg After Deadline	1
Repeat Course for Grade Only	6
Postpone Summer Term	8
Waive Summer Term	69
Exempt Summer Term	20
Additional Term in Residence	90
Five+ Year Enrollment Pattern	80
Reduce Sr Yr Residence Req	332
Late Exchange of Courses	44
Late Check-in Fee Waiver	31
Late D-Plan Change Fee Waiver	23
Reduced Tuition	2
Total	1,064

 

• Processed degree and enrollment verifications for 1,332 students


• Supported 265 students studying away on non-Dartmouth programs and 44 students on Exchange programs.


• Certified 35 Veterans

• Graduated 1,076 students



Term	Graduates
201006	22
201009	32
201101	38
201103	984
Total	1,076