The University of Pennsylvania's Online Computing Magazine
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November 1991 - Volume 8:3 [Printout | Contents | Search ]
By Randall Couch Students at Penn, unlike most of their Ivy League counterparts, can now find out their final course grades by phone. No longer is it necessary to trudge from building to building to consult lists taped outside classroom doors, or to wait for grade mailers from the Registrar's office. Since May of this year, an enhancement to PARIS - Penn's automated registration system - has made it as easy as, well, dialing for grades.
How does it work?To learn your grades, dial PARIS at 573-PENN as usual. The system's recorded voice will ask for your student ID and personal identification numbers. (If you don't know your PIN, consult the registration instructions in the official Course Timetable.) When this authorization, which protects the confidentiality of grade information, has been confirmed, the system asks you to select the desired school term. When you have selected a term, the choices on the PARIS main menu are listed. Depending on when the call is made (during advance registration, drop and add period, and so on), the available functions will vary. To list your grades, however, you will always press 6, regardless of season. That's all there is to it. Grades are available for the three most recent terms posted prior to the date of the call, including summer term.
When are grades posted?Instructors are required to provide final course grades to the Registrar within 72 hours following the last day of final exams. Grades are usually available online on PARIS about a week after that. Grades for the current fall term should be accessible by phone the first business day after the winter holiday break.
Planned enhancementThe PARIS grade-reporting system recognizes and speaks every type of grade used in each division of the 12 Penn schools (Medical, Dental, and Veterinary School courses do not appear in PARIS). These include not only letter grades with the qualifiers "plus," "minus," and "asterisk," but such reports as "Distinguished," "Ungraded Credit," and "Fail Then Pass, Repeated Exam," as well. In addition, the system must recognize those students on transcript/grading hold-that is, those who are not authorized to receive grades-and those on hold who have been given temporary authorization to receive grades.The grade-reporting feature was an enhancement planned from the beginning of the PARIS project. PARIS uses AT&T's Conversant 2 voice-response technology to allow a telephone to replace a terminal as an input/output device by emulating specific screens of Penn's Student Records System (SRS), an application on the University's administrative mainframe. The custom programming required to add the grade reporting feature was done by AT&T. No changes to SRS, or additional effort by UMIS staff, were required to bring up the enhancement. "Students are always anxious to receive grades," says University Registrar Ron Sanders. "This feature has appreciably reduced the number of inquiries at our office after each term. The students have accepted the technology quickly, and now it's taken for granted. But we know it's important to them. We get calls from other Ivies where Penn students have gone expecting the same service, and it's not there. The other schools ask us, 'What would it take for us to set up something like this?'"
RANDALL COUCH is a Senior Technical Writer for DCCS/UMIS Publications.
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