Winter break is almost here! And I know we are all as excited as our students. Maybe more excited than our students. No alarm clocks, ability to wear pajamas all day, books to read, Netflix series to watch, knitting to complete, cookies to eat. However, all of the joys of winter recess come with a big price tag: final grades. Before you can pick up that romance novel and Christmas cookie, you have to dig through the piles grading. Every job has drudgery and I can only imagine piles of homework to grade is the more boring aspect of teaching. My heart goes out to you.
We, in Registration & Records, have our own price for the vacation week. And that is running Satisfactory Academic Progress (affectionately known as SAP) in early January. This is the system that evaluates student progress toward completion, dictates credit hour maximums and ultimately financial aid eligibility.
It is a beautifully complicated system that is run on January 3rd. The computer programs magically review academic records and update student “standing” in Banner. Thank you to our Computing Department for creating this work of art.
As you can imagine --- your grading work and my SAP work are intimately linked. I cannot successfully process SAP if there are missing final grades in student records. So I am really hoping that you can enter your grades by the deadline of noon on December 26th. And once you have entered your grades, please double check that your grades have been saved on the roster. Any student with an F grade will need a last attendance date in the following format: MM/DD/YYYY.
If you have any problems or questions --- email me over the break so I can help you work through them. Please do not wait until January 3rd to contact me about missing grades.
There will be no access to the MCC campus during break week this year. My standard reports do not always run successfully from home. So, my ability to quietly send ‘friendly reminders’ will be limited this term. Please consider this your friendly reminder and know that I am happy to help work things out with you over the break week via email if you have any issues.
Get that grading done, eat those cookies and have a wonderful break.
Thanks,
Betsy Ripton
R&R
12/19/2016 |