Degree Evaluation fails for students

UNCG students attempting to register for classes this past week logged onto UNCGenie, the campus web system to view payments and academic transcripts, to discover that they could not generate their degree evaluation.

Students looking to generate their degree evaluations were met with an unfriendly “page not found” screen. The degree evaluation is the easiest way for students to determine what classes they need to take in order to graduate.

An advisor from the College of Arts and Sciences told The Carolinian that they “managed to make it through” by bringing up the students academic transcript online and looking at degree requirements from department web pages online. As a freshman advising office, CASA did not have many problems advising students’ as most will be continuing general education classes and fulfilling prerequisites for their majors. CASA was unaware of any previous issues with the system.

University Registrar Dr. Kelly Rowett-James said that a few weeks ago the University made the switch to Oracle 11g, a database system. The University discovered that application G, the software to function the degree audit, was not able to generate the evaluation. The University then worked with the student database vendor and discovered the presence of ampersands in the code, effecting the degree evaluation.

Rowett-James advised students to use their academic transcripts and the undergraduate degree bulletin to decide what classes to enroll in. Rowett-James stressed the importance of the functionality of the degree evaluation and said that the glitch “will be fixed as soon as possible.”

Senior Samson Ayana was unconcerned with the performance of the degree evaluation, however Ayana would have liked an e-mail from the University. “If it is going to be down for an extended period of time you would like a memo or something through e-mail,” Ayana said.

Eric Hounchell, also a Senior, said that, “You never know exactly what classes take care of what requirement so that is also something that really affected me. You like to have that (degree evaluation) up while registering for classes.”

Hounchell continued, “Losing one resource is going to greatly effect what you are trying to do inside UNCG.”

By Thursday afternoon, some majors had the ability to generate their degree evaluations, including those in the Bryan School of Business and Economics.

Rowett-James said that a program was expected to run this past weekend to automatically delete all of the ampersands.

Once the program is complete,  UNCGenie should be up and running smoothly