What’s New in STARS?

June 2009

1. Tip: How to get the original Transfer or First Time status of a group of students currently in a college/program/major?
   
   Example: Suppose you want to consider all undergraduate with a program in the College of Fine and Performing Arts and want to determine their original status as Community College Transfer, First Time, etc. Select
   
   
   • Term: (Current Term)
   • Enr. Status: Active
   • School: FA
   • Level: UG
   • Sub-report: Last App/Dec at Level
   
   Add in the variable Adm Stu Type Code for the transfer designation. There may be a small number of active students omitted attributable to missing admissions application that are typically from very old data not yet converted from the TP system. The full set of students can be obtained from the Population sub-report.
   
   
2. Credit Hours Classifications: What may seem to be a simple question like "How many Graduate Nursing Credits were taken in Fall 2007?" is actually more subtle that might be apparent. There are two primary questions:
   
   
   • Census or Production Data: Census data is frozen on the 10th day of classes. This is normally the choice for official reporting and has the advantage of being fixed; all reports against census data should foot, no matter when they are run. Production data is more up-to-date though unfortunately it is a moving target since there are occasionally backdated changes. All Stars reports except for Category 7 use live production data. So for example, Report 7e and 2c and would lead to similar but not necessarily identical totals since they use census and production data, respectively. Note also that the standard Registrar's Enrollment Reports are based on census data.
   
   
   
   • Student or Course Charateristics (Example-Graduate Nursing Credits): Are we summing all credits that are taken by students in graduate nursing programs (this is a student characteristic) or all credits in courses in the College of Nursing that are taken at the graduate level (course characteristics)? The standard Registrar's enrollment reports (as well as STARS Report 7d) are based on student characteristics whereas Report 7e is based on course characteristics.
   
   The bottom line is that census versus production might lead to slightly different numbers whereas student versus course characteristics might result in more substantial differences.
   
   
3. Report 1a: Students in Programs, Majors, ...: Several changes have been made:
   • The Nonattendance report is designed to list students registered in one semester but not yet registered for a future semester. It includes fields like Home E-mail and Telephone Number. We have just added Flags for Active Financial Holds and Active Academic Holds.
   • We have incorporated the Stars Program Applicants Report 1b into this report. The advantage of doing this is that the user has many more options such as considering a wider variety of applicant subgroups (e.g., Applicants, Admits, etc.) or adding variables into the report (e.g., ACT). Once this has been tested, we plan to take the Program Applicants Report offline. Here’s how it works.
     Select Term (Ex: 200909)
     Select Enr Status to be any one of the choices: Applicant, App Rejection, App Incomplete, or Admit.
     Select the School (Ex: FA)
     Select Level (Ex: UG)
     Selecting a Program, Major, etc. is optional
     Selecting variables is optional
     Select the Sub-Report either Applicant Info (Unique) or Applicant Info (Multiple)
     
     The unique version includes only the last Previous Institution giving 1 record per student while the other potentially includes multiple records per student if there is more than one Previous Institution.
   • The "Last App at Level" sub-report gives applicant data for each student in the selected group. It is setup to give one record per student, application, and decision. Typically, there are multiple records per student application since there are different decision stages of an application. For example, early on an "Incomplete" descision may be entered and finally an "Admit Regular". We have now added a second version of this sub-report called "Last App/Dec at Level" that gives only the last Decision for a particular student application and hence a single record per student.
   • Two other reports in this category have been subsumed under this report.
     
     
     • New Program Applicants - Listing of students who applied for a Program during a specified term. The same output can be obtained with Enr. Status: Applicant and Sub-report: Applicant Info (Unique or Multiple).
     • Program Student Schedule - The class schedule of students in a Program and Major during a specified term. Similar output can be obtained with Sub-report: Class Reg/Sched/Grades.
       
       

May 2009

1. New Servers: We are completeing the process of installing new servers and software to run Stars. The target for the switchover is June 2009. This should result in more efficient data retrieval and as a result, better performance. Of course, any transition may have a few bumps along the way. So once we announce the switch to the new servers, please let us know (stars@wayne.edu) if you encounter any new or unexpected problems.
   
   
2. Report 7b - New Student Tracking Tool (NTSS): An updated beta version of this report has been linked below the original on the reporting menu page. We have added context-sensitive help and a variety of new sub-reports including one that tracks Re-Enrollment from term to term.
   
   
3. Tracking GPA (Grade Point Average): We have added a set of term based GPA fields into the (census) variables:
   
   
   • Term GPA: TERM_GPA
   • Term GPA Hours: TERM_GPA_HOURS
   • Term Hours Attempted: TERM_HOURS_ATTEMPTED
   • Term Hours Earned: TERM_HOURS_EARNED
   • Term Hours Passed: TERM_HOURS_PASSED
   • Term Quality Points: TERM_QUALITY_POINTS
   
   This enhancement is based on a modification of the Stars (OIA) Enrollment Census which now stores these fields at the end of each semester.
   
   To give some further context to this, there was an issue raised by a few users who want to track GPA to evaluate and assess program interventions. The problem with using "live" Banner is can be explained as follows. There are two tables in online Banner (SHRTGPA and SHRLGPA) that maintain student term and level credit, quality point, and GPA information. Two points are important to note: GPA can only be calculated after grades are submitted which occurs at the end of the term (or part of term). Also, if a student retakes a class, the GPA fields will be recalculated so the value for a specific term may eventually change. From the point of view of assessing an intervention, one would want to use the GPA computed at the end of a term and not one that was recomputed later based on a class retaken during a later term.
   
   What we have done at this time is back-populated the Term GPA fields in the STARS (OIA) Enrollment Census for terms Fall 2002 (200209) to Fall 2008 (200809) with the current values in SHRTGPA. So these values will be based on the updates to that point. Starting with Winter 2009 we will populate the STARS Enrollment Census with values from SHRTGPA as calculated at the end of the term. In the future this will be helpful since we will be able to report GPA’s at the end of semesters and not after classes are repeated in a later term. (It would have been nice if we were saving the end-of-term GPA all along but we can only repent for the sins of previous semesters and implement better design for the future.)
   
   
4. Weekly Pre-term Census: We have added a new version of the Stars (OIA) Enrollment Census that maintains census data on a week to week basis prior to the census freeze date for each term. Though we are compiling the data, it is not yet available online. We hope to have some tracking reports available in the not-too-distant future.
   
   
5. Graduation Roster report (3b): We modified this report so it includes specific graduate school PhD information when the Degree selected is ‘PhD’.
   
   
6. AccessID in Census Reports: We have added the variable AccessID WSU into the Cohort Track Tool (CTT), Report 7a, and New Student Tracking Tool (NSTT), Report 7b, so it can be added into any of the sub-reports in which it is not contained by default.
   
   
7. Report 1a, Students in Enrolled in Programs and Majors: You can get a list of all students who graduated up to and including the selected term in the specified college, program, or major. Usually the term would be the current term. You would want to select
   
   
   • Enr Status: Graduated
   • Sub-report: Degrees
   
   
   Note that if you choose the Population sub-report, you will not necessarily get information related to the degree received; instead last or current student program infromation will be displayed.
   
   
8. Department and University Honors: Codes and descriptions for Department and University Honors were added to a number of graduation and degree related reports such as the Graduation Roster.
   
   
9. Site Map: We have created a Stars site map to make it easier for you to find the location of data that are available through Stars. The link on the Home Page of Stars now goes to a Stars site map instead of the Wayne State Site map as it did previously.
   
   
10. Trackable Term and Cumulative GPA Variables: The variables:
    
    
    • Cumulative GPA: CUM_GPA
    • Cumulative GPA Hours: CUM_GPA_HOURS
    • Cumulative Hours Attempted: CUM_HOURS_ATTEMPTED
    • Cumulative Hours Earned: CUM_HOURS_EARNED
    • Cumulative Hours Passed: CUM_HOURS_PASSED
    • Cumulative Quality Points: CUM_QUALITY_POINTS
    • Term GPA: TERM_GPA
    • Term GPA Hours: TERM_GPA_HOURS
    • Term Hours Attempted: TERM_HOURS_ATTEMPTED
    • Term Hours Earned: TERM_HOURS_EARNED
    • Term Hours Passed: TERM_HOURS_PASSED
    • Term Quality Points: TERM_QUALITY_POINTS
    
    
    have been added to the Stars (OIA) Enrollment Census. They are also available in the census based reports including the Stars Cohort Tracking Toll (CTT) and New Student Tracking Tool (NSTT). These variables can be tracked across terms using the Tracking Sub-reports.
    
    
11. Editable Help: This is being introduced in a number of pages in the Student Profile and the Reports module. The edit option will be available for appropriate individuals. This gives the opportunity to individuals who are knowledgeable about particular items to contribute to the Help text.
    
    
12. Database Monitor: There are 6 databases that STARS needs to connect with in order to be completely functional. These include Banner, Stars own database, the LDAP system, and 3 Testing databases. Logon is possible only when the first three are available. The database monitor tests connections to these databases and reports back the resuts.
    
    
13. Degree Audit Summary: After nearly two years of effort, the Degree Audit Unit has succeeded in creating program audits for all undergraduate and graduate programs offered by Wayne State University, almost 350 programs. We will continue to update these programs as departments make changes to program requirements. New programs are added as they receive approval from the Board of Governors.
    
    We are now accepting substitution and waiver requests from advisors. This allows us to customize an audit for a student, ensuring that the audit will be completely accurate for each student. We have also opened an email to students so they can direct questions to our staff about their audits.
    
    We have created additional features as part of the degree audit, including an unofficial transcript option and an improved print layout for the audits. The Plan of Work feature is still in progress as we continue to research software options.