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

XWALK_CRSE_NUMBER cross-walk table

(dwngss.xwalk_crse_number)

Explanation

The Course Re-numbering cross-walk table, containing the codes for the legacy SRS courses and their corresponding Pennant courses. The intended use of this table is to facilitate reporting on courses that must span the old-to-new student systems. Please carefully read the Cautions section below.

All legacy SRS courses that were converted to Pennant were transformed from 3-digit course numbers to 4-digit course numbers.

Legacy courses were defined by a Subject Area that could be 2, 3, or 4 characters in length, plus a Course Number that was 3 digits. The elements of the course ID were stored together in SRS as type CHAR, and thus the source field was always 7 (4 + 3; the subject area with spaces padding it out to 4 positions when necessary).

Pennant courses are defined by the Subject Area code and the Course Number, stored in separate fields. The Pennant Subject Area code can be 2, 3, or 4 characters in length, and is stored as a VARCHAR. The Pennant Course Number can be up to length 5. Typically the course numbers contain 4 digits. Multi-term courses contain an additional alpha character appended to the end.

Source

The warehouse XWALK_CRSE_NUMBER table is a static copy of a custom Penn table. It contains the values used during the course conversion. It will not be updated again after go-live. The table was replicated from the ODS table UPENN_ODS.ST_COURSE_CROSSWALK.

Cautions and notes

• In the conversion of SRS courses to Pennant, some legacy courses were split up into more than one course in the destination database. This sometimes happened with "topics" courses, where it made sense to offer them as separate distinct courses in the new system. Thus the mapping of old-to-new course numbers is not a one-to-one mapping. In some cases, the mapping is a one-to-many: one legacy course number to two or more Pennant course numbers.
  Not every Pennant course number can be tracked back to a legacy SRS number.
• The course id fields that are a concatenation of subject area plus course number are formatted differently in Pennant (NGSS) than the legacy SRS course id fields. The Pennant course ids are a straight concatenation of subject area + course number, with no spaces. The SRS course ids pad out the subject area to 4 positions, even when the actual code for the subject area is less than 4. Example: SRS Subject Area BE + SRS Course Number 101 = SRS Course ID 'BE 472'.
  In Pennant Student Records, the course would be BE4720.


• Below are some definitions (because in the table and column definitions sometimes the following terms are used as if they mean the same thing):

"Pennant" refers to the entire new student ecosystem, encompassing Student Records, Student Aid, Student Accounts, and various anxilliary systems that are integrated with the core student system.

Ellucian's "Banner" product is the main core database.

"NGSS" is the name of the project that migrated Penn's student systems from the mainframe (SRS) to Pennant.

• So when you hear "SRS" or "Legacy," think "old system" and when you hear "NGSS" or "Pennant" or "Banner," think "new system."

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