Getting credit for courses taken outside of Penn just got a whole lot easier - or so the School of Arts and Sciences says.
This past summer SAS launched a new computerized program designed to make credit transfer easier for students who have transferred from another school, earned credit away or studied abroad.
According to College Dean Dennis DeTurck, in the past students and faculty alike have had to "schlep" papers from department to department in order to get credit processed. The new program, called XCAT, has made it possible for students "to get their credit transferred in a timely way" by completing the process online - and in one place.
The XCAT Web site allows students to obtain transfer credit by either entering information about the class they took or selecting their class from a list of pre-approved courses the University has reviewed.
SAS Computing's Ted Marvel explained that the automated pre-approval process is one of the benefits of XCAT. He added that, in the old system, credit was awarded on a case-by-case basis and the same class could end up counting for different credit for different students.
The system came as a response to sentiment that the traditional method of transferring credit was too complicated and time-consuming, said Associate Dean of Academic Advising Gary Purpura.
XCAT was created "with faculty and staff in mind," he said, adding that programmers offer individualized training in the system for both students and faculty.
While officials say XCAT will help get credit transferred in a faster, more efficient way, some students still see problems.
The waiting time for approval, while shorter, still exists with the new program. Additionally, students say a lack of personal communication between students and faculty could be a problem.
College sophomore Michael Gold, who transferred from Indiana University this year, said it was nice to be able to complete most of the work online, but there were times when he thinks the process would have been fairer if he could have made a case for himself to a faculty member face-to face.
Gold added that another problem with the system is that many professors don't provide electronic copies of their class syllabi, which the University requires students to input on XCAT to facilitate the process of awarding credit.
But other than minor glitches, Purpura said there have been no formal complaints of problems with the system from students or faculty thus far.
Still, he admits that "until you actually have people using it live . you don't recognize when you have things you want to tweak." PurpProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0
a explained that programmers are "treating this year as kind of a test year," to see how the new system works.
"We've gotten a lot of really positive feedback from students and departments," said Marvel, adding that he hopes to have all of Penn's four undergraduate schools using XCAT sometime in the near future.
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