Behind the thousands of degrees that DePaul awards each year is the degree conferral process, overseen by EMM’s Office of the University Registrar. When a student applies for graduation, their home college ensures that their degree requirements are complete, then submits the student’s information to the Office of the University Registrar for final review and processing.
Recent upgrades are improving the way college offices verify a student’s eligibility to graduate. In an effort to increase accuracy and efficiency, the University Registrar’s Office worked with Information Services to integrate data from the Degree Progress Report (DPR) into the conferral process, along with other university requirements for graduation. The DPR, a tool within PeopleSoft, tracks the different liberal studies and degree requirements a student completes towards their degree.
The new system alerts colleges if a student does not meet all the requisites for graduating—and prevents the college offices from submitting those students for conferral. In addition to checking that a student’s DPR is complete, and that there are no pending grades, the system verifies that a student has:
- Maintained academic integrity;
- Completed the required credit hours for the program;
- Achieved the minimum GPA for graduation; and
- Completed their last 60 credit hours at DePaul (if they are an undergraduate).
“By building these requirements into the system, we’re limiting errors that typically came from what was previously a manual process,” explains Katie Bijak, associate director for degree progress in the Office of the University Registrar. “The new system also allows us to prioritize students for follow-up since we’re automatically alerted of whose information is missing.”
“Another advantage is the increased communication between our offices,” continues Bijak. “We work more closely with the colleges on special exceptions and student concerns since the system now identifies those students earlier. It has made for quicker and more efficient collaboration and problem-solving.”
In addition to these upgrades, the Registrar’s Office implemented a batch-mode process for running DPR reports on students who are in line for conferral. Running DPRs in batches rather than one-by-one is saving hours of staff time and labor, speeding up the conferral process further.
These improvements went into effect in fall 2018 for the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, College of Law and the School for New Learning. The Registrar’s Office plans to roll them out to the other colleges by the end of the 2018-19 academic year.
For more information, contact
Katie Bijak, associate director for degree progress in the Office of the University Registrar.