An Overview of DARS Audits

DARS is a tool used by students, advisors, and the graduation department.

DARS provides assistance in determining a student's progress in the completion of their chosen degree program.  It shows all of the catalog requirements needed to obtain a degree, indicating which ones have been completed and which requirements are yet needed to be finished.  This information is shown in a document called an audit.

In order for DARS to produce the proper results, it needs to know some basic pieces of information about a student:

• the degree they are pursuing
• their major(s) and minor(s)
• the catalog year they are following

Having that data, DARS composes a blank diagram of the particular degree program a student is pursuing.  It then gathers all of the student's converted transfer work (if any) and all classes taken at Minnesota State University, Mankato.  The courses are pushed through the blank diagram, filling in the blanks when matches are found.

At the end of that process, an audit is produced.  Satisfied requirements have "OK" displayed on their left side, while unsatisfied ones have "NO" shown.  Components of requirements (sub-requirements) have "+" displayed on their left side when fulfilled and "-" when they are not. Items which are unsatisfied or unfulfilled generally show the courses that can be used to complete the items.

Along with requirements being shown on audits, various other information is displayed, such as credits totals, GPA's, all courses taken, advisors, etc.

Every DARS audit looks basically the same, regardless of the degree program.  That is, all programs are constructed with the same parts:

• Fundamental University Requirements
• General Education Requirements
• Diversity Requirements
• Major Requirements
• Minor Requirements
• Program Electives (courses not made use of by any of the above areas)
• Unusable Courses (courses not completed, having grades of F or NC, etc.)

The following diagram shows the above parts arranged as they are in an audit.

 

This is an [PDF] example of an actual DARS audit (145 KiB), containing some annotations.

Questions concerning transfer work should be directed to

the Transfer Evaluation Department

room:  WA 132; phone:  389-5265

Questions concerning DARS should be directed to

DARS-Questions@mnsu.edu