Students will soon be able to evaluate their own credits from both Mt. Hood and other schools using the Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS), coming to Mt. Hood Community College as soon as this May, according to an MHCCD Board presentation Wednesday night.

Peggy Maas explained the program for board members, which was begun in July and is now nearing the end of the first phase. “Faculty, counselors and advisers currently have access to the program via the Mt. Hood website, and admissions and records degree evaluators are currently running DARS for students who have applied for graduation.” The system was developed by Miami University in 1985. Many Oregon colleges are already using DARS.

“What is degree audit reporting system?” Maas asked. “Well it is an automated way for students to know by a couple of keystrokes on a computer what they have completed for a degree or program.”

The first phase of implementation at MHCC included loading information from the MHCC catalog of programs. More features are expected to become available to faculty and advisers in June. The next phase of training, scheduled to begin March 21, is transfer articulation, where Mt. Hood courses are compared to those of other schools to see which courses transfer and how. The final phase of the implementation is called CAS which stands for Course Applicability System. This national network will tell a student which schools have equivalent, transferable courses for their particular degree.

A student doesn’t ”have to be accepted or enrolled to use the DARS system,” said Maas. DARS will tell a student what courses to take in order to complete their degree. “This will improve the ease of transferring” both in and out of MHCC.

“The time it takes to evaluate transfer credits will be greatly reduced because DARS will automate that process,” said Maas. The system is also expected to increase the number of graduates from Mt. Hood.