Cleaning up advising records for students continuing into new programs after degree conferral

Cleaning up advising records for students continuing into new programs after degree conferral

Students who finish a degree and end their Tulane experience at that time are inactivated. Inactivation removes these students' records from the Advising List in Gibson. However, students who continue into new programs, usually at the graduate level, need to have their advising record cleaned up so that they’re removed from their advisor’s list and added to the new advisor’s list (depending on specific school protocol). Note that not all graduate programs assign advisors to their students.

Identify the list of students

If you’re working from a provided list, skip to the next section.

Make a copy of each:

  • The most recent enrollment report available in the CognosReports shared drive.

    • After spring conferral, use both summer and fall enrollment reports

  • Degrees Awarded report from the Self-Service Reports tab

Identify students who are on both lists.

  1. Open a new workbook or work from one of the copies you made previously.

    1. Copy all data in the Detail tab from the enrollment report. Paste as values wherever you’re working. If you’re doing this after spring conferral, repeat for the fall enrollment report.

    2. Do the same for the Degrees Awarded spreadsheet. Name this tab ListofAwarded.

  2. Open a new tab in the workbook. Copy all ID numbers of the enrolled students and paste them into column A in the new tab with the value in A1 as Enrolled.

  3. In Column B enter the following formula: =COUNTIF('ListofAwarded'!F:F, A2)

Breakdown of the formula elements

  • ‘ListofAwarded’ is a proxy for the name of the tab in your workbook that lists all of the awarded students from the Degrees Awarded report.

  • F:F refers to column F in the ListofAwarded spreadsheet, which is the column that holds ID numbers.

  • A2 refers to the value you’re looking up in the ListofAwarded column F.

  • The results are a count of the number of times the ID appears in ListofAwarded column F, which represents the number of awards the student received.

  1. Anyone with a count of 1 or greater needs to have their record reviewed.

Identify the effective term and curricula in SGASTDN

(1) Enter the ID number. (2) Don’t enter a term and if there’s a term already entered, delete it. (3) Click the View Current/Active Curricula checkbox. (4) Go.

When you’re working from a list of spring grads, you will need to check both summer and fall terms in SGASTDN. Students may be pursuing two degrees with one starting in summer and the other in fall, so both SGAADVR records will need updating in that case.

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The New Term field shows the max effective term.

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Select the Curricula tab to review the current and active program(s).

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Review and update advisors in SGAADVR

In SGAADVR, enter the student ID and effective term from SGASTDN. Click Go.

Compare the term in the key block to the term in the From Term field.

  • If the From Term is earlier than the term in the key block, it indicates that the advisor record was last updated prior to the effective term. This generally means the advisors should be ended.

  • However, before ending all advisors, review the list of advisors in the Advisor Information block to determine if they are appropriate for the program(s) identified in SGASTDN. You will also see the “From term not equal to key block term” message.

    • If you’re not sure if the advisors are correct, you can consult the list of College Advisors or SoPA advisors (under Student Support) or use Google to search for the person to determine their department.

  • If the From Term and the key block term are the same, this can be interpreted as the school has updated the student’s advisor record for the effective term. However, check to ensure that all advisors listed make sense for the student’s program in SGASTDN. If not, delete the non-applicable advisors.

  • Students who complete the master’s on the way to the PhD do not need any changes in SGAADVR. You can review SHADGMQ to help determine if this is the case.

In this example, the last time the student's advisor record was update in 202330, which is 2 years prior to the 202530 effective term. This student is starting their graduate program in 202530, we should end all advisors shown here.

Click the Maintenance button.

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Select End Advisor.

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You can move to the next student to review, but to check your work, click the (1) Start Over button. (2) Click Go. All advisors have been ended effective 202530.

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