Tips & Tricks: Maximum Hours in u.achieve®

by | Feb 24, 2015 | Training

Maximum Hours fields appear at both requirement and sub-requirement levels in u.achieve.
At the sub-requirement level, this field limits the number of hours that can accrue up to the requirement (e.g., if the student takes 10 hours, but Maximum Hours is set to 8, the requirement will report only 8 “earned” hours). It does not restrict the number of hours that will report for the sub-requirement.
Tips & Tricks: Maximum Hours in u.achieve®
Maximum Hours
field on a sub-requirement set to restrict the number of hours to count up to the requirement to 4
 
At the requirement level, the field only limits the number of hours that are reported up to any summary requirements that are encoded to monitor that requirement.

Maximum Hours
field on a requirement set to the default value
 
The audit below illustrates the effect of encoding Maximum Hours of 4 on each sub-requirement of the General Education Cultures requirement (audit run using a List All value of L) where the student has taken a five-hour and a four-hour course.

The audit indicates that only 8 hours are “earned” at the requirement level, even though the student has taken 9 hours of credit
 
When Maximum Hours is specified, the audit will report:

  • “HOURS ADDED” if the hours applied to the sub-requirement are less than or equal to the value in Maximum Hours
  • “HOURS TAKEN” if the hours applied to the sub-requirement exceed the value in Maximum Hours

If Maximum Hours is

  • Greater than zero (0), only that number of credits will add up to the requirement, but the full GPA effect of all hours applies
  • Zero (0), neither credit nor GPA effect apply to the requirement

You can set GPA to scale with the credits permitted by Maximum Hours using the Weight field on the Reference/Other tab.
Best Practice Recommendation: Do not change the default Maximum Hours value (999.9) unless a restriction of credit contribution is really required. Due to the Adjust phase, you rarely need to enforce upper limits because satisfied sub-requirements will give up unnecessary courses to be used elsewhere.
 

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