Principles for Student Degree Planning
Vision: Every student will have fundamental degree planning services at every institution with the ability online for
students considering transfer to assess degree progress at other SUNY institutions. All campuses will participate in
SUNY’s Degree Planning and Audit program to promote student degree completion.
The following principles apply to all undergraduate students at all SUNY institutions:

Every student must have access to effective degree planning services.

Professional advisement is essential to student degree planning and must be available to students. Degree planning
systems and other tools are intended to supplement professional services.

Every student enrolled at an institution must be able to assess degree progress (perform a degree audit) at that
institution through an online system.

Students considering transfer must be able to assess their degree progress for general education and identified
mobility programs (lower division and upper division requirements) at all institutions through a common, universitywide online system. Institutions must maintain their requirements for general education and the identified mobility
programs, and campus course equivalencies, in the common, university-wide degree planning system.

It is preferred that all institutions use DegreeWorks for degree planning.

It is preferred that all institutions provide students with advanced degree planning services (e.g., multi-semester
course plans, comparison of multi-semester course plans to scheduled course offerings, ¿what if¿ degree analyses)
through an online system.

Degree requirements are maintained by every institution in a degree planning system in a timely and accurate
manner.

Best practices will be promoted in the definition of degree requirements, and opportunities for greater standardization
will be explored.

The DegreeWorks implementation will promote collaboration and cost-effectiveness among campuses:

Campuses will work in clusters of three to four campuses to implement the DegreeWorks software.

The DegreeWorks software will be installed at a common site for all students and campuses to access. The degree
planning services must be available on a 24x7 basis with complete business continuity in place.
Degreeworks FAQs
Please see the appropriate link below for questions:
General
How are the costs of DW being covered?
The System is using Federal P-20 funds to cover the contracted costs with SunGard (licensing the software, campus
training, customizations, and some initial scribing for campuses), related hardware and software costs and bridge
development. Direct campus costs are lodging and travel for training participants and additional scribing with
SunGard, if a campus chooses to contract for the additional scribing.
Please expand on the customizations that SUNY purchased.
A system-wide website will be created to connect potential transfer students with all SUNY institutions. Students will
be able to bring together their academic history from various SUNY locations and perform a degree audit, against up
to three campuses, and review available courses at all institutions. The customization will also tie DegreeWorks to
the SUNY federation for security.
During the demo a contacts list serve was mentioned. Currently our Registrar is our DegreeWorks contact. Can
other people at the institution join this list serve?
Other campus staff can be added to the list serve and Confluence. The campus contacts should send requests
to dave.demarco@suny.edu with their names, titles, email addresses and existing Confluence User Ids if available.
How are the cohorts being formed?
Cohorts are being formed based on a combination of conversations with each campus, campus to campus
communication and collaborations. If campuses have a preference to be in a cohort with other campuses, please
work with those campuses and notify the System Office as soon as possible. The first few cohorts will be Banner
campuses that are fully implementing DegreeWorks given the availability of the data bridge.
If ITEC hosts DW for all SUNY schools – would it be one big database so that all schools have access to the data of
the other schools? Or would each school have its own DW database?
The data will be separated with each college only having access to its own data.
Is there Customer support when there is a problem with the software? Will the SICAS Center provide this support to
campuses?
It is currently expected that the SICAS Center will provide support to campuses.
Functional
Can you clarify exactly what functionality/version we will be using at the time of the implementation?
DegreeWorks 4.1.0 will be implemented.
What functions will the December upgrade bring to DW?
A presentation delivered at the Seattle DegreeWorks Symposium describes the major changes in the December
release.
What are the reporting tools that SunGard delivers with DW?
A specific reporting tool is not delivered with DW, but reporting can be accomplished using any SQL tool (i.e., Crystal,
Argos, OBIEE, and so on). Views are currently delivered for Crystal Reports and the SQL used to write those reports
are delivered in the DegreeWorks Samples of Reporting from the CPA and SEP Datastore Suppor t
Document.
Can we see examples of Financial Aid and Athletic audits?
Samples of these audits and reports are included in the presentation in Confluence.
Are there any ¿best practices¿ in terms of the scribing process? Who typically handles this? How many people are
involved; technical vs. functional resources, etc.
Yes – there are best practices. This will be covered at a high level during the Focus Calls for each Cohort and then in
great detail during the training for each Cohort. SUNY will define templates for General Education and the Transfer
Paths to streamline the process and to bring greater system-wide commonality to Degree Planning for all users.
What is involved in scribing all degree requirements for a full implementation?
SunGard Higher Education (SGHE) has a process whereby the scribing effort is estimated for each campus
assuming an experienced scribe resource. SGHE¿s estimate is based on the assumption that it is providing
experienced scribe resources that have been provided with training around institutional analysis in relation to Scribe,
as well as in-depth training in the algorithms with which scribing interacts. Because of this, and the fact that the
Scribe team is dedicated to their projects 40 hrs per week, SGHE can make progress more quickly and accurately on
the first pass. SGHE teaches its clients well, but clients struggle more with knowing the intricacies of the product
iterations and mostly, resourcing the project as SGHE is able to do. Therefore, SGHE typically lets a client know that
its scope of work (Scribe estimates) should be doubled if a client is wishing to take on that effort itself.
There was discussion about bridges already built for Banner. What was the bridge for – only the transfer
articulation? Or all of Academic History? Or registration activity, etc.?
The ¿bridge¿ for generic discussion, is a process that extracts needed data from any SIS (and possibly outside of an
SIS) and pushes it to the DegreeWorks database in a particular format. This makes it readable and from there the
data is analyzed for the student/advisor/graduation evaluator. The data coming from the SIS includes ¿necessary¿
data as mentioned in the question, but can also include ¿informational¿ data that is meant to assist audiences in
knowing more about the particular student. More about the data bridge is in the technical section.
Where are the major and minor GPA¿s calculated. We currently don¿t pull from our SIS – can this be managed in
DegreeWorks and if so, how?
DegreeWorks logic calculates these GPA based on courses being applied to specific areas designated as Major or
Minor.