Degree Audit is best understood by understanding two cycles: catalogs and students.
Catalogs:
Colleges partner with Official Publications in the Office of the Registrar to create a new catalog. For information on the legislative cycle or catalog publishing, please contact Official Publications. For the purposes of Degree Audit, the catalog is the source of information that lets each college coder know whether a credential is no longer offered, needs to be updated, or if a new credential is to be offered. Credential in this context refers to minors, certificates, and majors.
Coders are encouraged to understand the legislative/catalog process so that they know in advance what changes are coming that may affect their college or school's credentials in the Interactive Degree Audit System. Coders should reach out to OP for more information and to gain access to nextcatalog, which is a version of the catalog website that shows what is available online for the next, future, catalog.
For undergraduates, new catalogs are created every two years with the possibility of an addendum halfway through, while on the graduate side there is a new catalog every year. For example, the 2016-18 catalog was available for students in IDA by the start of Fall 2016. It was expired shortly after the summer of 2024. *The catalog lasts one year longer for the School of Architecture than other undergraduate schools or colleges.
With new catalogs being available for students in the Fall of the first year of said catalog, coding for that catalog begins in January of the same year (previous Spring). The Degree Audit team offers a weekly coding lab to encourage drop in advising. The team is also available to schedule individual training or advice sessions to help colleges implement their new coding.
As part of the new catalog process, the Degree Audit team will rollover all the credentials and coding from the previous catalog. For example, the information in the 2018-20 catalog was used to create the 2020-22 catalog. The team sends out a DPI report to each college. The college will need to update the DPI spreadsheet to notify the DA team what credentials should be deleted, updated, or added. In this context, the updates are for the DPI. Every credential in the DPI has associated codes and information that needs to be accurate. For example, credentials in a new catalog should have a CIP code and that CIP code should be active.
Understanding the DPI and Associated Codes
Majors are represented by a 7 to 11 character code knows as a degree plan code, degree plan interface code, or, once it is applied to a student, a profile. For example, the history major is listed in the DPI as LAHISBA. In the context of the DPI, you may refer to LAHISBA as a degree plan code, but most commonly you will think of it as a profile as you evaluate students with said profile.
The degree plan code has several uses. The first is that it represents an entry in the DPI where we store many important pieces of information about the degree. The second is that it is used for IDA for coding. Coding referring the process of creating or maintaining requirements for a credential. Using Liberal Arts as an example, IDA coding can be done at the L level, the LA level, and the LAHISBA level. In addition, COLA could decide to take advantage of all 11 characters and have coding done at the LAHISBAXX and LAHISBAXXYY levels. IDA coding starts at the most universal and goes down to more and more specific groups of students. For example, coding done at the L level would apply to all Liberal Arts students, while coding done at the LAHISBAXXYY would only apply to history majors in that specific track or specialization.
Let's get back to what data outside of IDA that the degree plan code represents. In each DPI entry, the following fields are available. Here is a screenshot for context:
Colleges can choose the text used for Title(Long) or Title(Short) as long as it does not contradict the Degree Description or the Major Description fields. Of the two fields, Title(Short) is the most commonly used and will be seen by students in audit selection drop down and on top of their audit results. We ask that colleges be consistent to prevent student confusion.
The three digit Degree Code is used to determine what type of degree a student is receiving. It does not have to be unique to one degree. For example, most BAs use the same three digit code. On the other hand, most of the BS degrees offered by our university use unique three digit codes per major. For more information about these codes, please contact Official Publications. The Degree Description field is automatically populated based off of the the Degree Code.
The CB Major Code field is another name for CIP code, which stands for Classification of Instructional Programs. There are federal, state, and institutional versions of CIP codes. This is done by taking the smaller federal code and then adding on a few numbers for the state version, and then adding another three digits for the institutional version. Let's take a look at the CIP code for LAHISBA: 5401010001000. 540101 is the federal CIP code. The following 0000 are for the state. The following 1000 is institutional and is created by IRRIS. When a CIP code is created by IRRIS is matched with a specific Degree Code. CIP codes typically last for the life of the degree program. However, it is always possible that the federal or state governments will update their codes, prompting downstream codes to change as well. On the federal level this tends to happen every 10 years. An existing CIP code cannot have its description changed. That means that if a degree program changes its name, then it will need a new CIP code and potentially a new Degree Code. CIP codes exist in three states: active, in phase out, and expired. All active catalogs should only use CIP codes that are active or in phase out. A new catalog should not use a CIP code that is in phase out, as the CIP will expire prior to the end of that catalog.
The Major Description is automatically filled in based off of the CB major code.
The Number of Minors Required field is typically one or zero.
Valid Degree is used to flag a degree as either valid, invalid, or invalid but audits can still be run.
Profile Default Plan is used to flag a degree as one that should be automatically applied to students who have the relevant advising or school major code. The default profile job runs at the end of every week. It will not apply a default profile to a student who already has a degree that shares the same filed of study as the profile default plan.
Prod Ready (Setup) must be set to yes to make a credential codeable in IDA.
Prod Ready (Live) must be set to yes to make the credential available for students in IDA.
Advising Code is another name for School Major codes. These are codes we used to categorize students, and are created by Official Publications. In this instance, a history major would be assigned the code L 50600 either during the admissions process or through a major change process. By adding the L 50600 to the degree plan code LAHISBA, we make it possible to match a history student with the correct history profile. Note that the DPI does not allow you to add a school major code from another school or college to a degree plan code. Because this is enforced, the DPI does show the first character of a school major code, as that will always match the first character of the degree plan code.
Hours for Degree refers to the minimum number of hours needed to satisfy degree requirements.
Years for Degree (Primary) refers to the number of academic years that a typical student will need to complete the degree.
Contact Pointer ID, Years for Degree (Secondary), and Notes can all be ignored.
Once the DPI has been updated and the credentials have been coded in IDA, the college is ready to go live. We recommend reviewing the "Go Live Checklist." To go live, the college's academic dean or equivalent will email us at degreeaudit@austin.utexas.edu to confirm that they are ready to go live. The first college to go live will be the Undergraduate College, as they are responsible for the Core requirements. After they go live, any other college may go live prior to the fall deadline. It is recommend that colleges go live prior to summer orientation audits if possible.
Once a college has gone live, it is likely that having hundreds or thousands of students running audits may help you discover a few flaws in your coding. Colleges can perform some migrations of updates from PROD-setup to PROD-live without notifying the Degree Audit team. However, if you add new requirements or delete existing requirements, you will have to send a migration request to the Degree Audit team listing which catalog needs the migration. You can also specify a field of study if the changes are limited to only that field of study. Unlike the go live email, an academic dean is not needed to sign off on subsequent updates. It is hoped that there will not be a significant need for more coding for a catalog that is already live. Most coding changes should happen during the new catalog cycle while students do not have access to the credentials in IDA.
Students:
A student's journey starts when they apply to the University. At this point, the student should have a School Major code, which is sometimes called an advising code. The school major has one character for the school and then five characters for the major. School major codes are created by Official Publications. They are associated with a specific field of study. Since the degree plan or profile codes for a major also includes a field of study, it is important that the associated field of study matches for both school major and DPI code.
Most colleges will opt to have several degree plan codes be flagged as "default profiles." Once the student is enrolled at UT, a weekly job will attempt to match the student's School Major code to a degree plan code, that contains a reference to that same School Major code. If a match is found, the student will be granted that profile. In this context, we refer to DPI codes that are applied to students as profiles.
The automatic job assigns default profiles. Colleges are expected to examine all default profiles and replace them with tentative or official profiles. A student must have an official profile prior to graduating. If a student is pursuing a minor or certificate, those cannot be applied to default profiles.
Once a student is consistently running the correct audits based off of their profile, they may discover issues that are unique to their situation. At that point, they will need to reach out to the college for assistance. Anyone authorized as an override maintainer can apply overrides to requirements or restrictions should they deem it appropriate.
It is expected that each college has a mechanism to find students who are ready to graduate; likely it is a graduation application. Such students will need have their profiles updated to official and they will need an expected CCYYS for their graduating semester. That will be used on the VO screen in NRRECS to confer the degree. For access to the VO screen and more information on conferral, please contact the Diplomas team.
The Degree Audit teams does play a limited role in the conferral process. We send out an email announcing the staggered certified audit run dates. On those days, we automatically run certified audits for students listed on the VO screen. The dates tend to be around the start of finals up until the grade processing night, when it is expected that almost all students will have all their grades finalized. The idea is that any undergraduate student with a 100% certified audit is ready to graduate. Any student that does not have a 100% certified audit needs to reviewed to either resolve the issue or remove them from the VO screen or Diploma's certified list. Please see Diplomas for more information about the certified/graduation list. If a college fixes an issue for a student, they can manually rerun a new certified audit to confirm that the student is at 100%.
As part of the email announcing the certified audit run dates, we provide a list of college staff members that will receive information about the certified audit run. Colleges are expected to review this information and let us know if any staff need to removed or added to this list.
The Degree Audit team will also send a report called the Certified Verification List Report. This is used to quickly identify students who do not have a certified audit at 100%. The Degree Audit team also manually adds a second tab to this report to help identify potential minor/certificate issues. For a minor or certificate to be conferred, one of the requirements is that the expected CCYYS for the minor/certificate must be for the current semester or earlier. If a student applies for a minor/certificate during their last semester, it is possible that the expected CCYYS will be for a future semester. For more information about minors and certificates, please review the minor/certificate page.
All that being said, it is important to note that the Diplomas team knows best when it comes to conferral, and you must reach out to them to get a better understanding of the processes.