The computer based technology that has allowed advisors and administrators to construct the curriculum for a semester calendar will soon be handed over to students to allow them to map out their schedules themselves.
The Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS) was originally developed in 1984 at the University of Miami at Ohio to answer students” questions as to when they were able to graduate, what requirements remained in comparison to what had already been taken and other “what if” scenarios. According to the Miami University at Ohio Web site, the program was developed to make a flexible system which could be “transportable” to other colleges and universities. Nineteen years later, over 150 institutions are utilizing this advising tool — and Northeastern University is one of them.
University Registrar Linda Allen said that DARS is an industry standard and is a premiere degree audit system.
“This is a good place to start [for Northeastern], there is only one version of the semester calendar,” she said.
Allen said the university has been using the program to transfer the articulation of Northeastern quarters into Northeastern semesters, as if the two are completely different schools.
“We have been successful and have been able to take students into the semester world,” she said.
Allen said that with DARS, the university has been provided with a common curriculum throughout the university, which NU never had under the quarter system.
“This provides us with a way to talk to everybody in the same manner, before we did not have a central view or repository,” she said.
With the program, the university has started from scratch and now the entire university is on a horizontal level; every college and school is on an even playing field.
Senior Associate Registrar Nina LeDoyt said all of the university’s department chairs have helped immensely in the coordinating of the curriculum in semesters.
“Working with all of the chairs gave us the ability to get input,” LeDoyt said. “Overall, the sense of the community is to make the semester curriculum as good as it could be.”
She added that the chairs were most concerned with making sure the integrity of the curriculum and programs as a whole are held in tact.
DARS will also be used by the registrar’s office to solve the problem of “unmet demand,” an initiative that Provost Abdelal has been pushing for. Using DARS, the registrar will be able to track trends of students attempting to register courses that may be full. If the tracking process shows a high demand for a course or a section, the registrar may be able to add that course, if resources can be pooled in time. This initiative may be ready for testing for the summer and should be fully functional by fall quarter 2003.
This effective program will soon be used to help students “self advise” as soon as summer quarter.
“The goal is for DARS is to become a student advising tool,” Allen said. “Our goal is get the program ready as quickly as possible over the summer. I am hoping to meet our target, so far we are on track.”
The degree audit program will be accessed via NU’s self-service Web site.
See DARS features, next page
