Change of Grade
Author | Summer Becker |
Creation date | 6/2/2022 |
Last revision date | 6/6/2025 by Maria Morales |
Status | Done |
Features | Intermediate web entry |
Industries | Higher Ed |
Summary
This process allows a faculty member to submit a Change of Grade request on behalf of a student. The request then goes to the department chair for review via Email URL. After the request is approved by the department chair, it goes to the Dean for review via Email URL, then finally the Registrar. If the Registrar approves the form, then the Registrar needs to confirm that the grade was entered into Student Information Systems (SIS).
This workflow shows some integration from the SIS by pre-populating data in a ProcessMaker collection, and some low-code aspects (e.g., the grade change being manually recorded in the SIS by the Registrar user).
Here a presentation video
Demo Video
Demo as of 9/23/2022
Script
The Change of Grade process starts by a faculty initiating a change or could be started by another process. An example of another process that would start the change of grade could be a grade appeal process. In this example, we are going to be a faculty member who clicks on a URL hosted in the institution portal or intranet website.
1. To start the process click the URL: https://universitydemo.trials.cloud.processmaker.net/webentry/49/node_13
2. Login as the ‘Engage’ user using the credentials in the user access box at the end of the page.
3. Tell the audience that if connected to Single Sign On, additional login would not be necessary. We do want the system to authenticate and log user information for the audit trail.
4. Choose the following data points at the top of the form
a. Year = 2022
b. Session = Fall
c. Course = Introduction to Criminal Justice
d. Section = 1
e. Tell the audience that the demo is a mix of integrated and low-code. The drop downs can be populated by various methods: Ellucian customers = Ethos, API, or flat file import into the ProcessMaker platform.
5. The second half of the form takes a low-code approach where the student information is manually entered by the faculty (or the demonstrator)
a. Your Name (First, Last)
b. Any ID number (12345)
c. Email = enter your email address with +demo before the @ sign (e.g., sommerlin+demo@processmaker.com) so that the emails for this process will go to your email inbox.
c. Original Grade = I (Tell the audience that this student had to stop out for some reason and the faculty agreed to provide an Incomplete grade, and now the student has completed the coursework. The faculty is now requesting the change).
d. Date Original Grade was submitted = 5/13/2022
e. New Grade = B
f. Provide a reason = Course work completed, final grade submitted
g. Instructor Name = Jessica Parker
h. Use your mouse to make a mark in the signature
6. Click Submit to Department Chair
7. Go to your email inbox, there should be an email to the Department Chair. Open the email and tell the audience that infrequent users can be notified by email with a link to action. Again, if connected to SSO, it will use those credentials to authenticate from the URL.
a. Right click on the URL and open in an Incognito window and review the data
b. Type Department Chair ‘s name
c. Using the mouse, make a mark in the signature
d. Click submit
8. Go back to your email inbox. There will be 3 emails this time.
a. To the Student: Change of grade has been submitted.
b. To the Instructor: Department chair has approved
c. To the Dean - this one, you’ll need to Right click/Open in Incognito window and approve again just like with Department Chair, but this time acting as the Dean persona.Submit this form through the process.
9. Go back to your email inbox. Review the emails.
10. Log in as Registrar. https://universitydemo.trials.cloud.processmaker.net/
11. Review the Dashboard, showing the In-app notification at the top right and the in-progress items in the middle.
12. Click on the task from the Inapp notification at the top right.
13. Review the form information, and click approve. The screen will refresh.
14. Scroll down and note that now there is an indicator that the grade change has been made in the Student System. Tell the audience that in a low-code environment without integration, manual data entry to the SIS is required, but capturing acknowledgment that the change was made will kick off notification to the student. In an integrated environment, this step would happen automatically behind the scenes once the registrar approved it.
15. Go back to the Dashboard (click the Home button in top left corner), scroll down the form to the completed tasks. Find the one you just completed and click on it to show the audit logging by the system. A nice feature of the system is that it logs every activity and step in the process for audit purposes.
User access:
Instance URL: https://universitydemo.trials.cloud.processmaker.net/
Start process as Engage user: engage password: J8ePjFAGRfw2W6YcqFVe+
Registrar Login: user registrar password: J8ePjFAGRfw2W6YcqFVe+
Building blocks
Process Map
Process
Screens
Connectors
Scripts
Saved searches
Custom UI
Most times, Faculty are going to click on a form url from an internal portal page and not log in to ProcessMaker. We will want our system to authenticate them using their Single Sign on. If we must show them logging into the platform, then we need to talk to them about the Faculty being logged in using SSO.
In our script, we’ll also want to mention that this could also be started as a subprocess from the Grade Appeal process and be initiated automatically from there (this would be part of the script until we can show Grade Appeal process).
We should move the Session/Term and Year to be the first things selected. Each professor will have different courses taught based on the session and year. So the faculty should select that first, and then move to the courses they taught in the chosen semester from a drop down. They could teach the same course with multiple sections every semester for decades - so we’ll want to make sure that this works well for that scenario. It might be helpful if we could show them finding the course both ways - by Session/Year first or by course name first.
We’ll want to capture the approval by the user (can’t be anonymous) in our logs. So, if we can achieve that by using SSO/SAML when a user clicks on a link from email, log in using SAML/SSO, and it takes them directly to the tasks (and not to the general dashboard) that is what will demo the best. Not sure if we can actually do the SAML/SSO part, but we may have to talk about that in our script. We’ll want to show capture of the grade change audit trail. This is an item that gets audited for Financial Aid, particularly for grades of Incomplete and/or Audit. *In our script, we may want to mention that using ProcessMaker, the institution could add notifications going to Financial Aid for grade changes.
Dashboards:
Faculty - just something that shows requests that they are allowed to start and the status of the requests they have made.
Registrar - Grade Changes, Major Changes, Transfer Credit Evaluations as the quick start buttons.