The advising report will undergo a complete renovation and will be available for all students beginning June 3 on Whitewater Information Network for Students.

Registrar Jodi Hare and Provost Beverly Kopper have presented the new academic advising report to Whitewater Student Government, Academic Staff Assembly and Faculty Senate.

About a year ago, department chairs raised concerns to Kopper about the advising report in terms of its readability and usability.

“Jodi came to department chair’s workshop and then had a series of meetings to develop a format that was more user friendly, easier to read, and more useful not only for department chairs but for students and staff as well,” Kopper said.  

The campus-wide change will impact, how students view their graduation plan, an impact that will not be taken lightly, Hare said.

“It has been received really well, and I am hopeful,” Hare said.  “We have been utilizing advising coordinators, additional staff from each college and students.”

When the new AAR goes live, there are going to be a few problems, but those are going to be expected Hare said.  The main focus is to have an improved process in place.

“Initially, we wanted to make it more printable,” Hare said.  “The problem we found was when switching from the old format to the new format, the data fields were not pulling information from same source.”

If someone was looking at the set up of a course from behind the scenes, the course had a name and a code.  Most of work on the new format has been dedicated to going through every course and clearing up the data field conflicts.

Once completed, the end result will be easier for everyone to read.

Samples of the new AAR plan to be available for students to view and compare to the old one on the registrar’s website. 

Hare’s main focus is creating a complete sample that will be very similar to the version that will be released June 3.

“We don’t want any fields missing, because we don’t want any surprises afterwards,” Hare said.  “We are doing as much testing as we can.  Right now, we have multiple people looking at every single sample.”

There are some quirks in the current advising report and they will continue to work on improving them Hare said.

“There is a lot of technical set up when it comes to conjunction requirements, and sometimes it was supposed to be an ‘or’ when it was suppose to be an ‘and,’” Hare said.  “We are looking to go to every single one of them, and sit down with every college to clear up as many problems as possible.”