Tuesday, June 19, 2012

By Lynn Latimer Wilson

As of June 2012, all undergraduate students with a matriculation term of Fall 2007 or later will be able to easily access degree requirements due to the completion of the DegreeWorks implementation.

Over the past two and a half years, the Office of the Registrar with support and partnership of many units on campus has worked to implement the DegreeWorks system. The system allows undergraduate UGA students and advisors to access degree requirement information that helps to ensure students are on the right track to meet degree completion requirements.

The DegreeWorks system has widespread benefits for the campus community including students, advisors, and the university as a whole. “The system lets you know if a student has completed requirements or not” commented Amber Rayborn, Student Affairs Professional in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “It organizes everything so beautifully.”

In order to help organize information and see what is missing, the system color-codes requirements. Within seconds, students and advisors can see which requirements are complete, in-progress, or not complete.

“DegreeWorks is so easy to use.” said Laura Dowd, Coordinator of the lower-division advising office in the Franklin College. “You can get to information quickly without wasting a lot of time.”

Students and advisors often need information quickly regarding how a change in major or how taking a given course will affect requirements. The “What-If” feature allows students or advisors to understand the impact of changing a major in just a matter of seconds.

“From a university perspective, DegreeWorks will be able to provide more planning information” said Rosemary Segreti Associate Registrar at the University of Georgia. “Once we implement the Planner feature, the information available will help to better forecast class and section needs.”

With greater focus being placed on college completion, it will be critical moving forward to utilize the planning information gained through DegreeWorks with other university planning data in order to help students complete degree programs in a timely and effective manner.

For more information on DegreeWorks, please visit http://www.reg.uga.edu/DegreeWorks.