Understanding Advanced Standing

• What is Advanced Standing?
• Advanced Standing Reference Data
• Recording a Student's Advanced Standing
• 'Granting Statuses' of a Student's Advanced Standing Record

Detailed explanations and instructions for the use of individual database forms can be accessed from the subsystem's table of contents or via the numerous links provided here.

What is Advanced Standing?

• unit credit - granted when prior studies, expertise or experience satisfy the objectives of the specified unit. This form of advanced standing is frequently termed an exemption.
• partial credit - granted when prior studies, expertise or experience satisfy a proportion of the objectives of the specified unit. Partial credit is recorded as a percentage figure. The student does not receive recognition for partial credit and must still enrol in the unit and complete outstanding requirements before a grade is awarded and credit points are gained.
• unit level - where course rules permit, unit level advanced standing is granted for a number of credit points on the basis of prior completion of studies judged to be equally acceptable within the structure of the course. This form of advanced standing is frequently termed an unspecified exemption.
• unit preclusion - recorded when it is deemed inappropriate for a student to enrol in a unit within the course structure. A student precluded from enrolling in a unit is required to enrol in another unit or group of units with an equivalent credit point value to satisfy course requirements.
• Within a single course attempt, a student may be granted a combination of unit credit, partial credit and unit level advanced standing up to limits specified in course rules, and may be precluded from enrolling in specified units.

Advanced Standing Reference Data

The Advanced Standing Configuration form is used to record 'control' and 'default' information used by the subsystem. This information is:

• Expiry Date Increment - Advanced standing applies to a particular student course attempt. Advanced standing is initially recorded with a status of APPROVED (most commonly for UNCONFIRMED course attempts). The advanced standing is automatically 'applied' (changed to status GRANTED) by job ADVJ4411when the course attempt status changes to ENROLLED (most commonly when a student confirms their enrolment and enrols in units in a course attempt). If a course attempt is not confirmed within a specified period the advanced standing will be expired (changed to status of EXPIRED). 'Expiry Date Increment' records the number of months which are added to the approved date of an advanced standing record, to create a default expiry date for the record. Recording a Student's Advanced Standing explains in greater detail the interaction between advanced standing and student course and unit attempts.
• Unit Deletion Cut-Off Date Alias - Students can apply for and be granted advanced standing credit in particular units. These units would normally be part of the student's program of study and as such may already be pre-enrolled or enrolled against the student's course attempt. The student is not required to study units for which 100% credit advanced standing or preclusion has been granted, so the System attempts to automatically delete these unit attempts from the student. A point in time may be reached after which it is inappropriate to automatically delete such units (a census date could be one of these). This field permits the recording of a date alias as the date after which deletion of units is not permitted. Units for which advanced standing has been granted after the deletion cut-off date are discontinued in accordance with the current discontinuation date criteria.
• Default Basis Institution - is an optional field designed to speed data entry. A default basis institution should be inserted if a majority of advanced standing records are granted on the basis of prior studies at a single institution. The default can be over-ridden where required.
• Default Major Exemption Institution - Advanced standing may be based on prior study at more than one institution. The System derives the major exemption institution based on the amount of advanced standing credit contributed by each institution. The default value is recorded here to enable a student's course attempt for their first advanced standing record to be saved prior to entering unit and unit level details (i.e. before the System is able to derive a value). The recommended default value is the DEST value 0001 - '...no exemption granted'.
• Count Duplicate Units as Advanced Standing - is an optional field enabling institutions to include units transferred via the Course Transfer Process (duplicate units) in advanced standing calculations used for display, data validation and DEST reporting. The calculations include:
  • Total Internal and external advanced standing approved or granted
  • Total advanced standing approved or granted
  • Proportion of course granted as advanced standing
  • Total advanced standing granted for each source of academic credit (i.e. institutions where previous studies were undertaken).
• Not Transferable - is an optional field enabling institutions to prevent the transfer of advanced standing.

The System Advanced Standing Recognition Type form is used to assign attributes to the System defined recognition types. A System Recognition Type describes the effect the approval of an advanced standing application has, in regard to a student's enrolment. The System Recognition Types and their effects are:

• CREDIT - Credit may be granted for particular units. This means that a student has been recognised as having satisfactorily undertaken prior study to an extent deemed equivalent to the requirements for the unit for which credit is granted. Recording this recognition type against an advanced standing, unit detail record will affect a student's enrolment as described in Recording a Student's Advanced Standing, below.
• PRECLUSION - An advanced standing application may result in the recognition type PRECLUSION. This prevents a student from enrolling in the specified unit. Alternate units, in which the student may enrol, can be specified. Preclusion generally results where a student has prior studies which are deemed not to constitute equivalence (to the specified unit) to the degree necessary for credit, but they are sufficiently similar such that studying the specified unit would not require the expected level of academic endeavour. (e.g. A student may have studied music at secondary school. The student might be precluded from taking the unit 'Introduction to Music' due to it being at a similar level to the prior music studies. Alternate units, such as Music 1A or Music 1B could be recorded against the advanced standing record as options available to the student.)

Recording a Student's Advanced Standing

• the student applies for advanced standing in a course of study and provides the required documentation to support the application
• the application is assessed (approved/disallowed) by a responsible officer (This is commonly a faculty representative)
• approved applications are recorded on the System

'Granting Statuses' of a Student's Advanced Standing Record

• APPROVED - Advanced standing is recorded on the System with a status APPROVED. This signifies that the student's advanced standing application has been assessed by a responsible authority and approved for granting against the student's course attempt.
• GRANTED - The approved advanced standing record has been applied to a student course attempt. This status can be applied manually for INACTIVE, INTERMIT or ENROLLED student course attempts (for instance, where an academic transcript containing this information is required immediately). However, it is usually applied by a batch process (ADVJ4411) that checks APPROVED advanced standing records against their related student course attempts to determine if the course attempt status has changed to ENROLLED. If this is the case, the advanced standing status changes to GRANTED.
• CANCELLED - The status CANCELLED is manually recorded against a student's advanced standing record when the student withdraws their request for advanced standing. (For instance, the student may wish to study a unit for which advanced standing has been approved, in order to improve their knowledge in that area, or improve their grade.)
• REVOKED - The status REVOKED is manually recorded against a student's advanced standing record when the institution withdraws its approval of an application. (For example, this may happen where an advanced standing application was approved on the basis of false or misleading information.)
• EXPIRED - This status is automatically applied to a student's advanced standing record when the advanced standing has not been granted by a specified date. Each APPROVED advanced standing record has an expiry date (the default being the Approved Date plus the number of months specified by the Expiry Date Increment). The status change is applied by the batch process (ADVJ4412) which checks the expiry date of APPROVED advanced standing records, against the current date. If the expiry date is earlier than the current date, the advanced standing status changes to EXPIRED.

Instructions and rules regarding the use of 'granting statuses' are available under Create Advanced Standing Details.