Faculty Q&A’s about SIS

Q: Will all areas of the Faculty Center be available?
Security to Faculty Search will be disabled. Advisement link will be available if they have been given security to Instructor/Advisor Table

Q: How far back will historical roster data be available through the select term drop down for faculty center?
Instructor information was converted from January 1, 1999, anything prior to this will not be viewable in the select term dropdown. BOE report SR2820 will be available to view instructor information prior to 1999.

Q: For Incompletes, do we still need to complete a paper contract?
If the instructor is submitting Final Grades through Blackboard, they will need to complete the paper Incomplete Contract. Instructors who submit Final Grades in their online SIS Grade Roster won’t need to complete the paper Incomplete Contract. They will enter a Lapse Deadline Date, Lapse To Grade and information regarding what student needs to complete to remove the Incomplete in the online grade roster.

Q: Will students be allowed to use a wait list?
Not at the time of go-live.

Q: Will faculty have the Student Center available to them for advising purposes?
No. Division Chairs will have access to the Drop-In Advisees function of the Faculty Center for advising purposes.

Q: How can we change a grade if we accidentally save the grade roster?
We will use the current process. Faculty will complete the Change of Grade form.

Q: How do we withdraw students during the semester?
This will be done by Faculty in their online grade rosters.

Q: If a student does a withdrawal with A&R, will it show in my online roster and grade roster? If so, how quickly?
Yes, all withdrawals will appear on the rosters as soon as they are processed.

Q: Will all faculty, including adjuncts, have to complete the FERPA Tutorial before go live? If so, why and how will we communicate that and track it?
Yes. Employees will now have access to student information and to maintain the integrity of our records all employees must go through FERPA. When an employee completes the FERPA tutorial it is sent via email to Dr. Green, the Security Administrator for PVCC. She and Stella will track it. Paul Dale and Paul Golisch are updating the faculty communication plan and will include this element.

Q: How will we make sure they all get security access to the faculty center?
Faculty will be issued security access to the Faculty Center after they complete the FERPA tutorial. We will need to track it and send reminders to those who have not completed it.

Q: In the Grade roster, what is the difference between the Roster Grade column and the Official Grade column?
Most of the time both columns will reflect the same grade. When the instructor enters a grade in the Roster Column then saves it and marks ready for review, it posts through A& R and also becomes the grade in the Official Grade column and the grade posted to the student transcript. However, if a grade change is done through A&R later, the changed grade shows in the Official Grade column and is the grade posted to the student transcript. The original grade given by the instructor stays in the Roster Grade column so there is a record of the grade change.

Q: How does the online Change Grade process work?
Faculty will now be required to enter all student grades in SIS and the A&R Office will process the posting of the grades. Once grades are posted Faculty will not have the ability to change grades. They will use the paper process we currently have in place.

Q: How quickly does the system update as changes are made? For example, as students register, how soon does the seats left in the class reflect a registration?
Immediately, as when the student (or Faculty) enters the data, and presses SAVE it is recorded in the Database and is available whenever the next query of that data is performed.

Q: What will be the availability hours at go-live?
The SIS application is intended to be available around the clock - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, this level of uptime will not be possible for some period of time after go-live. As typical with any large application implementation, there are expected to be issues with application tuning, software fixes, and hardware adjustments that will need to addressed on a daily basis, particularly just after go-live. For this reason, application availability will be limited initially, and gradually increased as the system performance and stability is validated. The following is an estimate of system availability after go-live:

This schedule is an estimate. If the system stability can be achieved earlier, then longer uptime hours will be implemented earlier. However, if a specific incident or ongoing issues dictate, then downtime will be scheduled as necessary to address the situation.

Q: Can we extract the data from SIS to use in other applications (such as Excel or MicroGrade)?
Excel is an option to run BOE reports in. Also in some of the grids throughout PeopleSoft there is a little icon that will download the contents of the grid into an excel document.

Q: In the faculty center, you can see dropped students in the roster, but you can’t see the reason code. Where will they be able to see this, or will they at all?
In the class roster you can only see the enrolled, dropped (or purged), withdrawn or waiting status for students in a class. If the instructor looks at the grade roster for the class he/she will be able to see the drop/withdrawal reasons for each student.

Q: Can we upload grades from MicroGrade (a third party grading software many of our faculty use)?
The system is currently set up to work with Blackboard, Midas (which is going away), WebCT and RioLearn.

Q: How will grade submission work from Bb? (Do we just enter a letter grade in the column and the interface does the rest?)
The instructor will add a Final Grade column to the Blackboard gradebook and enter the grades. The Bb grade extract run will check every course every evening for grades posted to the Final Grade column and upload them to SIS. In theory, if instructors use Bb to post grades they should not have to use the Faculty Center. Withdrawals will be processed with the reason code of 50 (no reason given). The LDA (last date of attendance) will be the last date the student accessed the course or the start date of the course if the student never accessed the course.

Instructors who submit Incompletes via Blackboard must complete the paper Incomplete Grade Contract.

The exact process will be covered in Faculty Center training.

Q: How will accounts for adjunct faculty be handled? What is the process, where will they go, how long will it take, how will they modify their account?
All current staff and faculty will have their account available at go-live. As staff and faculty are hired, someone at your institution will use the MEID AT tool to create their accounts in the Student System. Faculty will have the faculty and student roles automatically assigned to their accounts. Staff will have the basic access and student role automatically assigned. Additional roles that are needed will be assigned by your college security administrator.

Q: How will students be reinstated to a class? Is this a faculty responsibility?
We will follow the same process we now have in place. If the instructor is requesting the student be reinstated they will complete and sign the registration card and submit it to A&R for processing. If a student is requesting to be reinstated the student will complete the card and have both the instructor & division chair sign the card for approval.

Q: Does the system flag students who have not met a prerequisite (e.g. if a student skips a level or goes to the next without passing a required class, will the system catch it?
The system has prerequisite checking. If the student does not have the prerequisite on file, the student will not be able to register on-line.The registration will take human intervention in the A&R or Advisement offices. Staff will still be able to override a prereq as we currently do in Legacy SIS. If the student is enrolled in the class (i.e. ENG101 for Fall 07) and registers in October for ENG102 for Spring, the system will let the student do it. I'm not aware that it will catch it after the fact, if the student does not pass ENG101 with a "C" or better.

NSS Home