Six criteria registrars and CIOs can use to test degree audit software against their own SIS, rules, and staffing.
Many degree audit evaluations end in a spreadsheet of checkmarks that every vendor can fill in, and the questions that matter later, such as whether the data connected cleanly and who spends their week maintaining the rules, never made it onto the sheet.
The best degree audit software for a campus is the one that connects cleanly to your SIS and applies your own rules accurately, with permissions your team controls and upkeep your team can handle without a vendor on call. The criteria below give registrars and CIOs a shared way to test each of those, plus the implementation and time-to-value questions that decide whether a project lands on schedule.
An audit is only as good as the data it reads, so the first question is how the product connects to your student information system and the other platforms advisors use. George Mason's registrar page shows why this matters in practice: anyone marked as an Advisor in the student information system can submit an exception request from inside the audit, so the audit's permissions depend on the roles and records the SIS holds.
A live connection to a system like yours is worth seeing in every demo, along with how the audit behaves when the SIS is down. Your IT team will want the data flow diagram, and your registrar will want to know who fixes a sync failure at 7 a.m. during registration.
Accuracy is hard to judge from a demo, because demos use clean examples. Bring your own, with a handful of real student records that represent your messiest situations, such as a double major with overlapping courses or a transfer student on an older catalog year.
The University of Iowa's registrar describes declared audits that track progress toward majors, minors, and certificates, plus what-if audits for programs a student has not declared, so ask each vendor to show both for a student with several credentials. Watch whether each product shows its reasoning when it applies a rule, since a result nobody can explain becomes a help desk ticket. For the double-counting cases worth including, how a degree audit decides where a course counts walks through the common ones.
Degree audits touch the student record, so who can see and change what is a governance question for your campus. George Mason's registrar offers a concrete model: an exception request is submitted inside the audit and needs review and approval from a program-level and a college-level approver, and the approver and timestamp are logged and visible to advisors, approvers, and students. Exceptions are where much of the day-to-day work happens, so that is a useful model.
Mapping your roles before the demos pays off, because you can decide which exceptions an advisor can enter and which need the registrar, then have each vendor configure exactly that and show the audit trail of who changed a requirement and when. Departments that handle waivers and substitutions will notice a weak permission model quickly, so bring them in early.
CIOs will already have security questions, and those belong in the evaluation from the start. Vendors should be able to say where student data is stored and who on their side can reach it. Ask how the product supports your FERPA obligations and how long a typical security review takes.
Retention and exit deserve attention too: if you leave the product in five years, what do you get back and in what form? A vague answer is worth noting.
The work continues after the software is turned on. The University of Iowa's registrar team describes encoders who review each catalog page every year so the audit matches the catalog, and its audits were requested about 2.2 million times in FY25, so accuracy at encoding time matters at that volume.
Vendors differ on who does that work after launch, so specifics matter: how much requirement setup the vendor performs, and what tools keep requirements current as programs change. Our guide to assessing your degree audit's effectiveness lists maintenance signals worth tracking.
Time-to-value is the gap between signing and the day advisors and students trust the audit. A realistic timeline comes from your own data, and each vendor should say which tasks sit on your critical path. Running a check on your SIS first, such as our data readiness checklist, makes that conversation more concrete.
Agree on what "live" means in measurable terms, such as which programs are encoded and what accuracy you will accept in testing. A shared definition protects both sides when the schedule gets tight.
Whatever scoring method you choose, include the people who will open the audit every day. Advisors can judge a plan view within minutes, and an exception workflow that does not match reality will be obvious to the registrar's team. If you want to picture a working setup, degree audit automation is a good place to start. Bringing your hardest cases to a demo is the quickest way to see how Stellic handles these criteria.
There is no single best product, because the right choice depends on your SIS, your rules, and your staffing. Evaluate candidates against the six criteria in this guide, and test each one with your own student records.
Universities often have many colleges with their own policies, so complex rule sets and integration with several systems deserve extra weight. Use the same criteria and put your most complicated programs into the demo.
Include your integration needs, the capabilities advisors and registrars rely on, your security and data requirements, and the real student scenarios you want demonstrated. Public registrar pages such as George Mason's show what to specify: exception requests submitted inside the audit, tiered approvals, and a logged audit trail.
At minimum the registrar, a CIO or IT lead, advising representatives, and someone who handles exceptions such as waivers and substitutions. Including these users early keeps the evaluation grounded in daily work.
It depends mostly on your data and how many programs need encoding. Ask each vendor for a timeline built from your own data, and run a data readiness check before signing so the estimate reflects reality.
