Major Academic Planner: Help

This section explains how to use MAPPER (Major Academic Planner).

First-Time Users

If this is the first time you have used MAPPER, this section is for you.

The idea with MAPPER is to plan all of the classes you will take between now and graduation. Listing ALL of your classes is probably too much to ask. Instead, we will concentrate on the most important classes, your major and your general education.

As you type in your classes, MAPPER will let you know if there are any problems. You might accidentally take some prerequisites out of order. MAPPER will tell you. You might be planning too much or too little in a semester. MAPPER will tell you. You might be hoping to take a class in Fall, but it us usually offered only in Winter. MAPPER will tell you.

Where Do I Begin?

First tell us a bit about yourself. Fill in your student ID number, your name, your address, and your telephone number. This will let us get in touch with you if necessary. It also prints on the completed plan that goes on file with your academic advisor.

Pick A Major

Continue by picking a major. The drop-down menu has a long list of majors and catalog years. For each combination, there is a list of requirements to graduate with that major. Sometimes the requirements change from year to year. You must pick a catalog year that overlaps with the time you are at BYUH. If you start school in 2003, you cannot pick the 2001 catalog. You must pick the 2003 catalog or later.

If your major is not on the list, bring or send a copy of the major requirements sheet to Don Colton at GCB 130-B and he will add your major to the list.

Double Major? If you are planning to double-major, pick both majors. You can select up to two majors.

Pick your Minor. If you are planning to minor in something, pick it from the list. You can select up to two minors.

Pick your Catalog. Select the catalog year for your General Education requirements. Currently you are permitted to select one year for your Gen Eds and a different year for your major.

Update Often

As you make changes to your plan, whether you have added something new, deleted something old, or whatever, press the UPDATE button to send your changes to MAPPER.

MAPPER remembers the plan you are working on. It is called your SESSION. As long as you continue working on that plan, MAPPER will remember it. When you turn off your computer, MAPPER will forget your plan unless you SAVE it. More about that later.

Type In Your Classes

If you are a new student, you start with a clean slate. MAPPER will show you a list of courses that you need to take for your major. These are listed on the right-hand side of the screen. Start with the top class on the list. It is probably the first class required in your major. Decide when you will take it. Type in the class and press UPDATE. You can leave the credit hours blank and MAPPER will fill it in for you. (If it is a variable-credit class, you DO need to fill in the credit hours.)

After you have scheduled that class and pressed UPDATE, it should disappear from the right-hand list. One requirement is completed. Well, not completed, but planned. With MAPPER, once the class is planned, MAPPER is happy and you can plan the next thing.

Keep working on your requirements list. It is important to schedule your major classes first. Sometimes a student will hear that it is better to take all your GEs (general education classes) first, and get them out of the way before starting on your major. DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT! That is a sure way to delay your graduation.

In most majors, you can really only take two or three classes each semester. But you need to take five or six classes to be a full-time student. Your best plan is to schedule your major classes first, then fill in with some general education classes and a religion class. The GEs are pretty flexible. You can take them almost any time. The major classes are usually not flexible. You may have a class that is only taught once each semester. Or once each year. Or once every two years. If you miss it, you could be seriously delayed.

Trust me on this. Plan your major classes first. Then add your general education classes and religion classes. Finally, add some electives for fun and variety. First things first.

Saving Your Work

It may take you a few hours to come up with a really good plan. Maybe it will take you a few days of thinking. You are going to need to save your work.

MAPPER makes it easy to save your work. Just press the SAVE button. If you are a first-time user, MAPPER will ask you to create an account. That means you pick a name where MAPPER will file your plans. We recommend that you use your BYUH ID number (seven digits), but MAPPER will allow other choices. You could use your email address. You could use your instant messaging screen name. Names are given out on a first-come basis.

You will also need to pick a password. This is not like ultra top secret, so it probably doesn't need your best, most secret password. But on the other hand, you don't want someone else to get into your account and change your plans. Why should they mess with your mind? Still, a weak password is probably good enough.

MAPPER can email you a password in case you forget. To qualify for this service, you need to provide an email address to MAPPER. Then if you forget your password, just type in your email address and MAPPER will email you a new, temporary password. It will not send you your chosen password because there are some security issues involved, but it will make up a new one for you and email it to you. Then you can use either password (your old one or the new one MAPPER selected) to log in.

Saving your work also makes it available to your Academic Advisor. She has a special password that lets her load up anybody's MAPPER file and see what your plans are. She can see what problems there are with your plan. This is a good thing.

Continuing Your Work

After a break, maybe you want to work on your academic plan again. You did some work already, but you are not done. You want to make changes and improvements. You saved your work. What now?

Start up MAPPER in the usual way and press the RELOAD button.

MAPPER will ask you to log in. You must provide the same login name and password that you selected the first time you saved your work.

After you key them in, your screen will be restored, ready for you to continue.

In Sync

There is one other option that is pretty handy. BYUH keeps track of the classes you have taken and the ones you are signed up for. They are part of your transcript.

MAPPER has access to your transcript, depending on who you are. Currently it has information on students in the School of Computing. Other students can be added by special request.

Each semester (maybe more often) the caretakers of MAPPER download your current transcript and make it available to MAPPER. It has all the courses you have completed and all the courses you are signed up for. You can press the SYNC button to have MAPPER add your transcript information into your academic plan. After all, classes you have completed are good for satisfying graduation requirements. MAPPER needs all that data to tell you whether you are going to be able to graduate.

This is especially handy if you are a new MAPPER user, but you have two or three years of courses completed already. Who wants to type all that in? Not me. By pressing the SYNC button, MAPPER will merge that information into your plan, thus saving you a lot of typing.

You do need to authenticate.

By this, we mean that you must prove who you are. We can't just let everyone see your transcript. Even though there are no grades on it, still we try to keep it fairly confidential. So, how do we know that you are really YOU, and not just some roommate or something?

The good news is that you only need to do this once. After you have proven who you are, we will remember it. But to prove who you are, we have to go through a bit of a dance.

Step 1: You will be asked to provide your BYUH email address. This is also called your Net ID. And you have to provide your student ID number. Not very secret, really, but it should slow somebody down if they are out for mischief.

Step 2: Next, we will make up a long number and email it to you. That is your authentication key. We will also put a blank on the web page for you to type in that number. (Okay, we know you will use copy and paste.) You have to check your mail, copy the number, and press the AUTHENTICATE button.

After you have done this, we trust you to SYNC records from your transcript at any time. Every semester you can use it to update your plan and find out if there are any problems.

Summary

Well, that about wraps it up. MAPPER keeps track of your plans and tells you whether they will work. MAPPER helps you find problems early so you can solve them. Nobody likes surprises, especially if they delay your graduation.

Basically you pick your major, you pick your classes, you pick your semesters, and you hit UPDATE. You press SAVE to save things for later. You press RELOAD to get them back. You press LOGOUT to end your session. You press SYNC to update from your transcript.

Pretty soon you are the expert, helping all those other guys that didn't read to the bottom of the page. Hey. Congratulations.

Advanced Users

If you have been using MAPPER for a while and you want to find out some of the special things it can do, this section is for you.

Clone

On the ADVANCED menu, there is a CLONE button. This is handy for making a copy of your plan, but unhooking it from you. You can then save it under another login name.

Miscellaneous Comments

This section consists of old documentation that was written a while ago. Some of it is out of date. Some of it is helpful. It is just extra stuff. Read it at your own risk.

Overview

MAPPER presents a grid of empty boxes, organized by semester. You should fill these boxes with the names of the classes you plan to take. For each class, list the course number and the number of credits. MAPPER is fairly flexible about how the course number is entered. For a class like Computer Science 101, any of the following wordings will work the same: "cs101", "CS101", "CS 101", "C.S. 101", "CS-101", and many more bizarre possibilities. In fact, MAPPER converts all course numbers into a uniform format for processing. It removes everything but the numbers and letters, and changes all the letters to lower case (small), so all of the above would result in the same answer: "cs101". The wording that you provide is preserved for you to see and print.

The number of credits helps MAPPER deal with classes it does not know. For classes that MAPPER does know, it will alert you to the discrepency.

After you have identified the major (or majors) that you are seeking, and the catalog that you are using, MAPPER can retrieve a list of graduation requirements that apply to you. These graduation requirements lists are carefully written by hand but may contain errors. If you discover what you believe to be an error, please notify the developer (mentioned on the "About" page) so it can be corrected.

About

MAPPER was developed by Don Colton with suggestions and testing from numerous people. Special thanks to Ivy Keawe for advice and guidance.

The primary purpose of MAPPER is to simplify the task of checking student major academic graduation plans. There are numerous small requirements necessary for graduation. Making sure that each of them is met requires a good memory or a checklist. And time. It would be nice to automate the task.

The secondary purpose of MAPPER is to get better projections for enrollments in upper-level courses. Lower-level courses can be planned based on statistical averages, but upper-level courses are filled with known students who have names and histories. It is not always true that every student will take every class for which they are prepared. Some students put off a class for a semester or two because they have other classes they want or need. Perhaps they are working on a double major. Perhaps they are working on a girl friend or boy friend. Perhaps they are afraid of a particular class. By having the student declare their intent in advance, the department can plan better before registration, in picking the number of sections to offer and the room size to seek.

A third purpose of MAPPER is to watch for scheduling mistakes that occasionally happen, and to notice scheduling problems that arise through failed or skipped classes. If a crucial prerequisite is not taken as scheduled, and nobody notices, the student may arrive in their senior year with a single lonely class required but not available. This has happened too often. It is not as rare as it should be.

There are also some happy side effects of using MAPPER.

Students can print their major academic plan (sometimes known as a four-year plan) in an easily-readable format without handwritten courses and smudgy erasures.

Students can evaluate their major academic plan to ensure it meets all graduation requirements without waiting for a faculty member or academic advisor to go through it.