A program to track and evaluate students’ academic progress each semester has completed a two-year pilot and will be fully implemented this fall.The Comprehensive Academic Tracking System, or CATS, which monitors students’ scheduling and academic performance, completed its pilot stage at the end of the spring semester and will be used with all incoming freshmen beginning fall 2011.The ultimate goal of the program is to create a more proactive approach to students’ academic success, said University Registrar Robert Doolos.”It’s all about helping these students to succeed and doing that through proactive planning,” Doolos said.CATS determines whether students are on track by evaluating various criteria deemed important by each academic department, like maintaining a certain GPA or scheduling a course deemed critical in a specific semester.If a student is deemed off track for two consecutive semesters, he or she will be scheduled to meet with a counselor to discuss the possibility of changing his or her major, Doolos said.”On the face of it, that sounds pretty dramatic, and actually it is,” he said. “But we don’t want students making decisions about what to do with their academic career way too late in the game.”Senior Associate Registrar Patti Beste said it’s important to students to understand the CATS program is completely for their benefit.”It’s not a punitive plan,” Beste said. “We’re not trying to hurt or punish you. We’re just trying to help you stay on track so you can use your time wisely.”Doolos said if students remain off track for too long, they could end up asking how they can graduate in the least amount of time, but the Office of the University Registrar is more interested in helping students graduate efficiently with a degree best suited to their ability.The two-year CATS pilot gave the registrar’s office time to evaluate the University’s needs and establish a program to address them.The pilot began in fall 2008, when the program was implemented with only a handful of majors, said Beste said. By the second year of the pilot, 50 majors had been incorporated.CATS began about five years ago when work began to create a more specific outline of graduation requirements, Beste said.The first step to creating CATS was developing detailed eight-semester plans for each major specifying the most efficient track on a semester-by-semester basis, Beste said.The actual monitoring of students’ progress is conducted by a tracking program that was altered during the pilot.The tracking tool was originally based largely on degree auditing, which Beste said was inefficient because CATS is based on semesters and dates, while the degree audit is not timely.”These are two different animals,” she said. “They both do very similar things, but they just didn’t work the same way.”Beste said incoming freshmen in 2011 will be tracked by CATS for two years.”The school of thought is, if you get students through two years, they move along pretty quickly and pretty correctly, then they don’t need a lot of guidance,” Beste said. 
 
 
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