Sitting on the second floor lobby of Lassen Hall on March 9, senior criminal justice major Cory Lubell waited to hear if he would be able to graduate in May.

Lubell finally decided to see an evaluator after he hadn’t received any notification. He found out he is three units shy of graduation.

Late graduation evaluations have plagued seniors across Sacramento State for some time. Many have received their graduation evaluations past the Feb. 20 deadline, the last day to register for spring 2009 classes.

Graduating students, like Lubell, who find they are missing units late in the semester will probably have to wait until the summer or fall semester to take the needed classes.

“If I didn’t check, I probably would have found out in the middle of summer,” Lubell said. “Which would be too late to take any summer courses.”

Approximately 3,700 students have applied to graduate after the spring or summer semester. On March 11, the Office of Enrollment Management said that it completed about half of those graduation applications.

Senior accounting major Desiree Renaud sat across from Lubell in the second floor lobby of Lassen Hall. They didn’t know each other, but they faced the same problem.

Evaluators told Renaud, who had also not received her graduation evaluation, that they couldn’t find her degree evaluation.

“We all have these commitments we have to make as students,” Renaud said. “If we don’t fulfill them, we suffer the consequences. They don’t have to. They don’t hold those same commitments to us.”

Associate Vice President of Enrollment Management Edward Mills acknowledged the problem and attributed it to the university’s new computer system, the Common Management System.

CMS is the California State University’s systemwide transfer to the PeopleSoft software application. Mills said the new system allows all the universities within the CSU system to communicate easier.

The student administration wing of CMS at Sac State, which includes MySacState, was implemented in fall 2007.

“In a nutshell, the university gained a lot of advantages from the system,” Mills said. “In other areas, we didn’t like with graduation evaluations.”

He said over the last 15 years, Sac State graduation evaluators have customized the software to make information, such as a student’s general education courses, major courses and any transfer units easier to access.

When the university switched to PeopleSoft in fall 2007, it lost all of its customized software, making it harder for evaluators to find student information.

“We used to be able to do 20 to 25 grad evaluations in an hour,” Mills said. “Now we can only do about four to six in an hour.”

Mills equates how the two systems work with finding Facebook friends born in a particular month. The old customized system is similar to Facebook providing an option of organizing friends by their birth months.

The new system is comparable to making the user look through each friend’s profile to find his or her birth month.

“If you think of all the components of a major, there are around 15 to 20,” Mills said. “Looking through all those components to find the information is cumbersome.”

Mills said he expects evaluators will be able to do evaluations at an acceptable pace, as well as assess a whole graduating class one semester before its last term by next fall.

Other Northern California universities are not experiencing the same problems with evaluating graduates.

Associate Vice President of Enrollment Planning at San Francisco State University Jo Volkert said they are not experiencing any backups in their graduation evaluations.

She said San Francisco State has not implemented CMS, and will not do so until 2013.

Volkert said the university has been happy with its current system and hasn’t examined the possible effects of enacting CMS.

Francine Freitas, assistant director of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, said its way of evaluating graduating seniors is much different than Sac State’s.

Instead of using a central evaluation office, evaluating and advising is done by each college. Each student meets with an adviser in his or her major and receives an evaluation on graduation status.

For a spring 2009 graduation at UC Davis, graduation evaluations must be completed between Feb. 1 and April 10.

Freitas said late evaluations have never been a problem at Davis. Also, students rarely find that they are missing units.

Mills said he is doing everything possible to make the system better for Sac State students.

He has hired new graduation evaluators, placing the current number at 13, and has been talking with the Information Resources and Technology division, which manages CMS, to customize the graduation evaluation software.

They have already created a custom advising summary page for graduation evaluators, and a single information window that contains all of a student’s coursework information.

IRT has also created a way to automatically create the letters students receive about their graduation status. Before this automated system, graduation evaluators were generating the letters manually.

Evaluators might be able to efficiently evaluate graduating seniors by next fall, but some department chairs are still advising their students to pay attention to their required classes, so they won’t be surprised like Lubell was.

Communication Studies Chair Nick Burnett said he meets with a few students each year who receive their evaluations late and find they’re missing units.

“I see people all the time who say they’re graduating in four months, and it’s the first time they’ve seen an adviser,” Burnett said. “It sends chills down my spine.”

He said this issue is troubling from any vantage point. The degree evaluation back up is a problem, but students should make sure they have completed all the required course work.

Michael Mette can be reached at [email protected].