Overview
Stellic introduced Additional Checks in August 2023 as a new way to confirm that a student has completed specific requirements within their degree progress. One way to think of Additional Checks is as an added level of verification, layered atop a student's degree requirements.
For example, the degree requirements for a Biology major may require a specific number of core and elective courses. These are captured in regular audit requirements. In order to meet graduation requirements, the Biology Department may also want to verify that the student majoring in Biology has completed at least 15 upper division courses and 30 credits taken in residency. These are the same courses being used elsewhere in the major audit, but the Additional Check can tally those courses to confirm this extra layer of validation.
An Additional Check in the Stellic audit lives in the area of the audit functionality dedicated to Milestones. As is the case with Milestones, Additional Checks act as a binary yes/no in terms of whether or not they are fulfilled. They will not calculate and display a remaining counter.
A fundamental characteristic of Additional Checks is that they are not a true audit requirement. Additional Checks will not "consume" courses or prevent them from falling to Unmatched. Courses that count in Additional Checks are able to be used both in any other requirement and in the Additional Check. In other words, courses counting toward an Additional Check will always double count with everything else in the student's record, including courses in the Unmatched section.
This means that the following double counting considerations apply to Additional Checks:
- Stellic will not display the double counting icon, since these courses are living outside of traditional double counting rules
- You do not need to add double counting constraints, since Additional Checks by default will always consider all planned, in progress, and passed completed courses that the student has taken
Additional Checks also have the following features:
- For Taken courses, the default behavior will only consider courses with a passing grade, unless the user has added a constraint that indicates otherwise. By default, failing grades cannot count.
- Additional Checks do not contribute to the majority of the overall program statistics. The total number of credits, program GPA, or number of courses are not impacted by any courses being counted in Additional Checks. However, an Additional Check does count as one additional requirement that a student needs to complete within the audit.
- This also impacts search - for example, when searching for students with "fewer than 5 courses" remaining, if the student has 3 courses remaining in their other requirements, but the check needs 10 more courses to be satisfied - this student would still appear in search results. But searching for students with "more than 3 requirements remaining" would include Additional Checks in the search results.
- Additional Checks do respect any of the constraints at the program level - so if a program says only undergraduate level courses can count, the check will only allow undergraduate level courses.
- Additional Checks need to exist at the first level of the audit. They cannot be nested into a second or deeper layer as a nested sub-requirement.
How to Build an Additional Check
1. In the requirement editor, select the type “Milestone/Other.” There is a new dropdown menu for “Requirement Type” - select “Additional Check.”
2. You’ll need to add a name for your Additional Check. We’ve also included some helper descriptive text to assist users in understanding what an Additional Check does.
3. When you click the add button, the Additional Check requirement appears. We’ve added a tag so that users can tell which requirements are Additional Checks. Like other requirements, you’ll need to select a primary constraint. Most of the constraint library you're used to seeing elsewhere is available - however, one of the features of Additional Checks is that they cannot house other requirements, so you’ll notice that “fulfill any” and “fulfill all” are not available constraint options.
4. Once you add your first constraint, the check will automatically add the constraint “Matched courses are only shown in expanded mode.” Since the purpose of an Additional Check is to count things, we anticipate most of these lists of matching courses will be long and users will want them to be collapsed by default. This constraint can be removed if desired.
5. Secondary constraints can be added as desired.
Displaying Additional Checks
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Additional Checks will not have a remaining count (the numbers that appear in the red box on the left next to traditional audit requirements), so they will always show as either fulfilled or unfulfilled.
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We will list all courses that count for an Additional Check in the requirement, and courses within an Additional Check will show with the traditional green or yellow checkmarks
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By default, Additional Checks will always display a credit counter on the right side of the requirement header.
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If an Additional Check has more than 5 courses that are counting toward it, we will display a course counter along with a credit counter.
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We will not display double counting icons in Additional Checks.
Examples of How to Use Additional Checks
We strongly recommend using checks for tallying courses that count toward other requirements. Additional Checks will not add to the total number of courses or credits required for the program. For example:
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Recommended: Student is required to take [x] credits of non-transfer credit ✅
- We would expect the student to take these courses in other requirements, so an Additional Check is just ensuring that this is the case
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Discouraged: Student is required to take [x] credits in total ❌
- This is not a correct use case for using an Additional Check. This is a scenario where it’s possible that the student takes all of their program requirements but is still short credits to graduate and needs to take additional elective credits not otherwise captured in the audit. Because an Additional Check does not add to the number of courses the student needs to take, this would be an incorrect use of Additional Checks. (In addition, if these courses weren’t used for other requirements they will appear in Unmatched, in addition to showing in the Additional Check.)
Here are some examples of requirements we have seen from partners where we would recommend using a check instead of a requirement:
Upper division credit
Residency credit
Non-departmental credit
Same subject code tracking/counting
A Note about GPA Checks
Note that Additional Checks were not designed with GPAs as their primary use case and do not add more functionality for robust GPA checking. However, for any partner currently using Stellic requirements to calculate GPA, Additional Checks are a better option, since they will not consume the courses and prevent them from being used elsewhere or falling to Unmatched.