Degree Audits and Checks

Besides “Student Advising”, one may also select “Degree Audit”. This calls up a student’s complete academic record of coursework at ACC and elsewhere. More usefully, it also breaks out which courses can apply towards different parts of the proposed degree requirement and allows you to recognize which courses a student will need to take to fulfill their degree plans. Ideally this should be a simple process. Unfortunately, few processes at ACC are very simple. Students may have transfer courses or have changed majors halfway through, so you will often have to make some decisions as to what qualifies as a fulfillment for a particular requirement. Does Calculus I from Auburn equal Calculus I and II here? Does Texas Government qualify as a Foreign Language? Sometimes the answer is obvious, but more often it is not.

The Faculty Advising Resources website is particularly useful in this regard. This site provides links to a number of other online resources. One of the most incredibly helpful is the course equivalency guide at http://www.austincc.edu/transfer. This shows which courses at other colleges equate to particular courses here at ACC. The list of other colleges is quite comprehensive, ranging from Angelo State University to the University of Texas at Tyler. Even a few out-of-state institutions are included. Just as usefully, it also shows when courses at other schools have no equivalent here.

Before they graduate, a full-time faculty member needs to sign off on a student’s degree plan to ensure that they have met all of the requirements listed in the catalog. So, as they near the end of their academic careers at ACC, students may come to you and ask for a degree check.

Always feel free to ask for additional documentation. When deciding on substitutes for non-science requirements, it is often helpful to contact the relevant department chair to ask for advice.

You should never feel pressured to sign off on a degree check if you are not comfortable with it.

Finally, it is important to note that a student must have completed at least 25% of their coursework at ACC in order to receive a degree from the college.