Does your school need a computerized degree auditing program, and fall into one of the following three categories?

•  Category 1: Our current Student Infomation System includes a degree audit module which we are considering purchasing.

• Category 2: We are seeking to replace our current SIS, and we want to see what kind of degree auditing capabilities our new one includes before we look at any separate packages.
• Category 3: Our current SIS has a degree auditing program. It doesn’t work properly right now, but the vendor has promised that it will be fixed in the next upgrade.

If you’re thinking of implementing a degree audit system included with your current student information system software, or an SIS package your school is considering purchasing, think again. The unfortunate truth is, most degree audit programs of this type are difficult to set up, difficult to use, and work unreliably if at all. 

To understand why this is so, one must first understand what makes a degree audit program unique among all other parts of a student information system. Unlike most parts, which function mainly to manipulate and retrieve student data, a degree audit system must check thousands—often hundreds of thousands—of combinations in order to find the optimum way to use a student’s courses. 

Creating a computer program that will check all of these combinations accurately and quickly is an unbelievably complex task. Even powerful computers, when using a weak program, could require weeks to check them all. Many programs, in order to avoid this, use what is known as a “first-fit algorithm,” which places a course into the first requirement slot in which it fits, regardless of whether that is the best way to use that course. 

Academic Audit™, by IronSoft, is built around a “smart” algorithm, which is able to check combinations more quickly and thoroughly than any other program on the market. In all but the most extreme cases, every combination is checked, assuring no wasted courses. Combined with extensive functionality and a user-friendly DOS interface, (Windows coming soon) the end result is a degree auditing and advising program that is second to none. 

Additionally, Academic Audit’s advanced algorithm allows it to be set up more quickly and easily than other degree audit programs—2 to 4 months as opposed to 1 to 2 years. With Academic Audit™, you need only tell it what the major requirements are, and it does the “thinking” after that. Other programs must be set up and maintained by trained programmers, and arbitrarily instructed how to use courses under various conditions. 

Why is Academic Audit™ so far ahead in the technology race? At IronSoft, computerized degree audit is not a sideline, it’s our specialty. Since our beginning in 1989, we have been devoted to perfecting the processes by which degree audits are solved by computer. While other vendors have struggled to make their degree audit programs work, our team of programmers have conducted continual, cutting-edge research to make Academic Audit™ work even better. 

We’ve also been devoted to making Academic Audit™ more understandable and more accessible to the "non-technical" computer user. As any one of our many satisfied users—registrars or advisors—will attest, Academic Audit lets them provide a higher level of service to students while eliminating the clerical drudgery associated with non-automated degree auditing and advising. 

So why wait for a primitive degree audit program “bundled” as an afterthought with your next student information system software, or for a promised “fix” which never seems to arrive for your current one? To find out more about Academic Audit™, contact us today—and find out how simple and inexpensive a computerized degree audit system can be.