This past fall, Robert Sternberg, the dean for Tufts School of Arts and Sciences, held the first of a series of town meetings for arts and sciences students and faculty. Although the main topic was intellectual life on campus as part of the freshman-year experience, the discussion soon encompassed a host of other concerns and interests. During the meeting, when a student said she was having difficulty determining the course requirements for her major, Professor James Glaser, Dean for Undergraduate Education for Arts, Sciences and Engineering (ASE), was able to reply that there is a simple, web-accessible system already in place to help Tufts students and advisors with exactly this issue – DARS, the online degree Auditing and Reporting System.
DARS, developed by Miami University of Ohio, was purchased by ASE during the summer of 2004. A project team comprised of ASE’s Information Technology Services (ITS) and UIT’s Administrative Computing and IT Infrastructure groups was then created to implement the system. Project team participants from ITS included Trish Sheehan, project steward; Dmitri Hoffmeyer, java programmer; and Carol Downing, lead user and degree audit expert for Tufts. From UIT, project team participants included Ann Sarno, technical lead and project manager; Joe-Armstrong-Champ, database administrator; and Branden Loizides, systems programmer. As Ann Sarno commented, “This project was truly a joint effort. Both UIT and ASE worked side-by-side on this.”
The implementation of DARS was split into several phases. In the first phase, launched in August 2005, DARS was developed and released for use by faculty advisors. The second phase, which required the development of an interface for student use, was completed this past October when a web version was piloted with approximately 600 Medford campus juniors.
The application compares a student’s academic work with the requirements of their chosen degree program and prepares a comprehensive report detailing the student’s progress toward meeting those requirements. Students can also enter “planned courses” or courses they expect to take down the road, helping them chart their progress toward their degree. It also can handle “what if” scenarios, creating audit reports that detail which of a students current and completed courses will transfer to other undergraduate degree programs offered by ASE.
“I had no trouble picking it up” says Brad Edmondson, a class of 2008 political science major who participated in the fall pilot. “I was planning out courses for the next semester and I wanted to make sure I had my requirements correct. I was also curious to see the requirements online, since I was a little disappointed when I first got here that there was no such thing {as DARS}.” DARS has already helped Brad reap some unexpected benefits, including the discovery that a course taken several years ago counts as a culture credit for LA language requirement. “This means I only have to take two more culture classes in that subfield in order to finish the requirement. I would not have realized this without DARS.”
The “next steps” in the DARS project include defining additional degrees and their requirements and a subsequent roll-out to the remaining students and majors in the School of Arts and Sciences. Considering Brad Edmondson’s experience, DARS is likely to become an indispensable tool for ASE students in the near future.
