An enhancement of Banner's internal transcripts that was scheduled to debut Thursday has been delayed indefinitely, the Office of the Registrar said in an e-mail to students yesterday afternoon.
Though Computing and Information Services tested the new interface for "roughly six weeks" in two testing environments, the upgrade was unsuccessful, Senior Associate Registrar Robert
Fitzgerald told The Herald. Fitzgerald said CIS took programming for the new transcript out of Banner to fix the problem, allowing students to once again access Banner's existing self-service transcripts.
The registrar's office "can't afford" to inconvenience students further, he said. The attempted changeover meant students were unable to access transcripts for most of the day Thursday.
The new transcript format has been "a long time coming on our enhancement list," Fitzgerald said. Besides not being able to print in its entirety on certain Web browsers, the current transcript format does not include student names and ID numbers and is not laid out clearly, especially for students who have both undergraduate and graduate records from Brown.
The new system will be "far more concise" and "print-ready," Fitzgerald said. CIS and the registrar's office modeled it on the internal transcripts that were available before the school switched to Banner. For students who were familiar with that transcript format, the current online transcripts look "like we took a step backward when we went to Banner," he said.
The new transcripts are "95 percent comparable" to the pre-Banner format, Fitzgerald said. In addition, they now include student names and ID numbers, convenient additions for advisers who are often looking at a pile of transcripts at once. The new format also specifies that marks of "S*" denote classes that students are required to take Satisfactory/No Credit.
The registrar's office hopes to have the new transcript program up and running next week.
