Student Attendance & Timely Graduation – The following are recommendations based upon our observations, conversations with University personnel, and testing:
Upon discussion with Myrna Bryant, Assistant Director of Financial Aid and past internal control reviews, communications regarding official and unofficial withdraws need to be modified. We suggest the current process of communicating official and unofficial withdraws from the student and professor is reviewed in further detail and a formalized process is implemented to communicate those changes to the Student Financial Aid Department. It appears there are instances where changes in courses are not being communicated timely, which can affect timeliness of funds returned to the federal government.
The determination of class offerings, frequency and number of sections appears to be a manual process. Upon discussion with Carlos Clark it would be beneficial to the University to invest in data mining and classroom planning software that is currently available to help determine the number of sections needed and the frequency of section offerings using past information such as class attendance figures.
Students should be made aware and advised that graduation in four years can be achieved, however, a minimum of 15 credit hours must be taken to accomplish timely graduation.