ST_TERM column definitions . Pennant Student Records Home . Data Warehouse Home

ST_TERM table

(dwngss_ps.st_term)

Explanation

Contains one row per student per term. The ST_TERM table houses information specific to a student in a term that is not curriculum-specific, such as the billing Rate Code, the location Site Code, the overall Student Status (active/inactive), and fields that identify their overall academic standing.

In the warehouse, we also include some things from the student's primary program, such as their primary division, primany degree, and the primary major associated with that primary curriculum. This does not mean you should use ST_TERM to report on curriculum. If you need to see all of the programs a student is in, you should use either ST_DEGREE_TERM or ST_DEGREE_PURSUAL. However, to facility reporting on students in a term when the report only requires information from the primary program, we include those elements in ST_TERM. This makes it easier than constantly having to join over to ST_DEGREE_TERM to get the row where the degree_order = 1 and to ST_MAJOR_MINOR to get the row where the major_minor_order = 1. In such cases, you can get the basic information from the primary program in ST_TERM, without having to join to other tables.

Source

The warehouse ST_TERM table is refreshed in batch mode from the Operational Data Store (ODS), which gets its data from the Banner database. The UPENN_ODS source table is primarily SATURN_SGBSTDN, with some data coming from SATURN_SGRSATT, SATURN_SGRCHRT, SATURN_SGRVETN. In the online Pennant system, the data in the ST_TERM table can be viewed on the SGASDTN form.

Common Uses

• Identifying the student status (active/inactive) in a term.
• Identifying whether a student is in any type of coordinated multi degree program this term.
• Finding students who are on study abroad this term.
• Finding students on academic probation this term.

Cautions and notes

• Legacy conversion: students in the old Student Records System (SRS) who had any academic activity since the Fall of 2010 were converted into Pennant Student Records. Anyone in the conversion population had all of their academic history converted. In other words, if someone started studying at Penn in 1990, and was still active in Fall of 2010, you will see terms going back to 1990 in the ST_TERM table.
• Term-effective vs. Term-by-term: In the source database (Banner), student records are stored as term-effective. For warehouse reporting, we store the data as term-by-term. Thus someone might have fewer rows of data in the source system -- particularly if they have not had a lot of changes in their academic program -- but they will have one row for every applicable term in the ST_TERM table. We continue to build out the student's record in ST_TERM until they 1) graduate, 2) drop or withdraw or in some other way end their studies at Penn, or 3) we build out the rows two terms into the future, with their expected status in those terms, based on the most recent term-effective information.
• Caution: if you are looking at a future term, do not rely on the term calculated fields such as Classification and GPA. Those kinds of fields will contain only the most recent available information, that come from the current term (or past terms that have been calculated) and do not apply to terms in the future where such calculations have not yet taken place.

ST_TERM column definitions . Pennant Student Records Home . Data Warehouse Home