Planning FAQ
Planning FAQ for Advisors
Common questions that advisors have about Academic Planning are answered below.
What if my school doesn’t assign advisors?
Your Planning dashboard will hide the charts of student planning status and notifications, because you’d be seeing data for your entire SSU. Instead, the dashboard will only show your Watchlist, where you can pin the students that you are currently working with.
Why am I not seeing any students in the search?
Ask your admin to check your user permissions. If you do not have assigned students, you will need the “View all students” permission. This gives you visibility to all students at your institution. At this time we do not have a way to segment the student population for a particular advisor or to assign students within the application. Assignments must come from your SIS.
What if I’m an advisor and a student?
If a user has a staff and student role, the user gets all of the student and advisor functionality in the left navigation (one log in). We refer to this as having “dual roles.”
What happens to a plan if a student becomes “inactive”?
If a student is active (in your SIS feed) and has a plan and then suddenly becomes inactive (drops out of your SIS feed), we do not delete the student created plan(s). While not in the feed, the student will not be searchable (in the top search bar) by an advisor.
If the student becomes active again, their plan will be there waiting for them!
Does the advisor dashboard update live, like comments?
No, it is not updating in real time. The dashboard data refreshes on demand, when you click it or refresh the page.
Why is “total students” different between the dashboard graphs?
The Plan Creation graph includes all active students, with or without a plan. The Credits Planned graph shows only those students that have both (1) a primary plan and (2) a term on that plan matching the term selected on the graph.
When is a student’s cart considered abandoned?
Immediately, if registration is not completed. For the engagement opportunity on the Dashboard, Students with abandoned courses in their shopping cart for [term], a course gets designated as abandoned as soon as it is left in the shopping cart without being registered. Ideally, students complete registration right after scheduling, so that they don’t lose their spots in their chosen sections.
Note that this opportunity checks the cart status in Scheduling, not registration records in your SIS.
What happens if I put a student on my Watchlist?
The Watchlist is a list pinned to your Dashboard for your use and workflow only: add students that you want to access quickly, and remove them when your planning support is no longer urgent. No notifications, consequences, or advising flags or notes result from watchlisting.
Why don’t I see the Plan button?
If you use Sample Student Login to get to Scheduler instead of using Planning, you won’t see any Planning links. You can use Sample Student Login to register students who aren’t assigned to your caseload, but you can do student searching, scheduling, and registering from Planning directly:
Tip
If you’re already logged into Admin Scheduling Tools, there is a link to Planning in the menu bar.
How do I get to Scheduler from Planning?
- To view your student’s schedule, use the top search bar to find the student by name or ID. When their information displays, select the Schedule tab.
- To log in as a student, select Scheduler Tools and use Sample student login to search for schedules. (This is the same as accessing and using Scheduler standalone.)
What if a course changes in this year’s catalog?
If a student moves a course to a later term, it updates, as needed: they see the course details and requisites that match the catalog for the term where their course appears now. Each plan is built on a given catalog year, but the future terms will look up course information from the catalog available for that effective date.
Important: This is different from the course audit (meaning, which catalog is used to satisfy requirements, such as whether BASIC still counts towards a programming requirement). If you have specific questions or needs around locking down requirements to specific catalogs, contact your Civitas team.
Where are course retakes displayed?
For faster deployments, course retake status is not pulled down from your auditing system. If you need retake status to be displayed in Planning, contact your Civitas team about a custom change.
How quickly do major changes in PeopleSoft appear in Planning?
Major changes (which are reported by the degree audit system) are reflected on the Degree Requirements page and in the Requirements panel on a student’s plan under the View details button. This is an on-demand data refresh: click the refresh 🔄 icon (Update Degree Information).