These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Academic Information Gatherer

Executive Summary

My project is in response to a time consuming process at my place work within BYU’s SOA. Academic advisors are required to search individual students each semester to verify their grades are at an appropriate level. This is especially true for students who are involved in integrated programs. This process is very repetitive and requires an advisor to spend approximately five hours at the end of each semester in order to complete.

In order to verify a student’s grade the advisor (particularly in the IS and Accounting schools) is required to search individual Net IDs and manually evaluate the grades. When a student’s grades fall below a certain level (B-), the advisor needs to identify them as marginal. Although some of the process must be done by the advisor, like discussing possible actions with the Associate Director of the school or potentially communicating the issue to the student, much of the leg work can be automated. This will save the advisors hours of time that, at the moment, are currently being used to perform this task.

The system that was constructed, taking over 20 hours, will enable the user to search a list of net ids for the grades of any semester the user would like to find. The program will insert the desired information into an easily accessible list in Excel and then it will evaluate each student’s grades and mark any that need to be inspected by the advisor. The program will also pull the student’s overall GPA for the semester and flag any that fall below a 3.0 (which is the minimum requirement for both the IS and Accounting programs).


Unfortunately, this project requires authorization from BYU to run because it is pulling sensitive student data. Thus, in this write-up photos of the results will be shown with any sensitive data omitted. The write-up will also depict the steps of the macro to ensure the reader is able to understand the process without actually being able to run the macro. 

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