With more colors, drop down menus and tabs, Ball State activated the DegreeWorks link on the MyBSU banner Monday in an effort to be more user-friendly.
The system will replace the previous Degree Analysis Progress Report.
Laura Helms, associate dean of University College and director of Academic Systems, described the DAPR as a “static snapshot.”
Instead of a long list of the required courses for a specific major, the new DegreeWorks system has several tabs and drop down menus.
“Students are going to be more comfortable, I think, with its look because it looks like applications that they use all the time for other things,” Helms said.
The DAPR does not work well with the new banner system, and Helms said DegreeWorks is more interactive.
“The DAPR was a great tool when it was first created years ago, but it hasn’t gotten any more user-friendly for students,” she said.
DegreeWorks offers several new features for students.
The home page shows two status bars for a student’s degree progress: one for the percentage of requirements completed and the other for the percentage of credits.
Underneath the status bars is a list of required courses for a student’s major. The classes are color coordinated with a legend, showing which classes have been completed, which are in progress and which are still needed.
The program also offers three GPA calculators. The first tells a student the average GPA needed in their remaining courses to graduate with a desired GPA. The second gives the student their GPA for the term. The third tells a student the number of credits required at an A average to achieve a desired GPA.
A student planner is also featured in DegreeWorks. With this, students are able to plan which courses they want to take each semester in order to graduate in four years.
The link to the DAPR page will remain on Ball State’s website because there are still some students that will find it helpful, academic adviser David Chalfant said. Students that started this fall, though, will only use DegreeWorks.
Chalfant worked with the DegreeWorks committee, providing advice from an adviser’s perspective.
“Generally, there were some good things that consisted from the DAPR that we wanted to be able to do in DegreeWorks,” he said. “But DegreeWorks also gives us many more capabilities that we didn’t have with the DAPR.”
There will be training sessions this week for students, advisers and faculty. Helms said she would find out the majority of the problems with DegreeWorks during the sessions.
“You always have technical problems when you’re doing a new system, but so far the training sessions I’ve done have gone very well,” she said.
