There is such a thing as a permanent record

But it's flawed

Every time I colored outside the lines as a kid and as a teenager, I was warned that my mistakes would go on my “permanent record,” which, in my religion, meant “God is watching,” and keeping track of my every miscue, and generally finding me wanting.

For the past two weeks, professors at my college have been helping students choose classes for spring ‘23, a number that feels weird to type. Actual registration starts on Monday, but in my department, we require students to meet beforehand with their academic advisers, and we sit and talk about what classes they need to take to graduate on time with their tails attached.

On my campus, students’ permanent record is stored online in Degree Audit, and though I’ve spent a lot of time on it, I’ve yet to find God there.

The website — with all the privacy protections you can imagine — includes important particulars about the students (their ID, grades, major, etc.) but I mostly pay attention to the classes they’ve taken, which tells me the classes they need to take. What it doesn’t include is anything approaching the whole story. You see only the C- in environmental science and the missing lab grade, but you don’t see the family illness that took the student away from school for weeks on end. Or you see the W (withdraw) and you don’t hear that the student ended up having to work an extra job to stay in school, woke up one morning and thought, “I have to cut something loose,” and what they cut loose was that art class, or that math class. You only learn context from the conversations.

The students start those conversations with an apology, as if they’ve let me down, and I quickly let them know they had not, and if I think it’s appropriate, I will share my own collegiate, color-outside-the-lines moment. I have several from which to choose, up to and including never showing up for a military sociology class (that was my minor) to the point where that haunted my dreams for year after graduation. Or I’ll tell them about getting the second-lowest grade on a photography midterm (a class I actually liked), and feeling a little disappointed that I hadn’t distinguished myself by, oh, getting the lowest grade, as getting anything higher would have meant I needed to have attended class, which I didn’t.

I think we can see a pattern here.

Students have access to their own records, but once they leave our registration session, they are on their own. They can clutch the list of classes we’ve agreed would be good, but sometimes? Students open up the registration page, and decide to take the classes they want to take, as opposed to those they need to take, and the result of going rogue can be the students have extended their stay on campus as they take the required classes they’ve been avoiding.

No one wants that to happen.

I have roughly 25 students to guide (or push) through the process, and each session takes maybe 20 minutes, though it can be longer (or shorter, depending on the student’s preparation prior to the session). This is my 14th registration prep time, and I know that you can divide the pre-registration students into two camps. At the beginning, most of the students arrive with a list of classes, and a few even come in with an alternate list, which is impressive. We have time to chat about their semesters, as well as their hopes and their dreams.

And then we get to the tail end of the preparation period — like now — when students who have gone down rabbit holes drag in with scarcely a shot at graduating, ever.

I’m kidding about never graduating, and if I took personally not being listened to in earlier sessions, I’d be annoyed. Instead, I’ve come to look at these more challenging students who don’t want to follow instructions as puzzles to solve. They want to graduate. I want them to graduate. What do we need to do (Mostly, “we” means “I,” and “I” need to fill out forms and make cases to the Powers That Be for substituting classes they’ve already taken for classes they should have taken). The ultimate goal is to educate the student, yes, but also to get that student up on a stage balancing a mortarboard being cheered on by family. So when a student says she’s pretty certain she should graduate in the spring, though she lacks two semesters’ worth of classes, I bite my tongue to avoid saying, “I’m pretty sure I was born an heiress. Who do I see to correct the record?” and we delve into what’s available for her.

And when another student announced that she was changing majors, and asked if she needed to continue attending classes this semester, I do not say, “Uh, no, unless you were born an heiress and don’t mind flushing the cost of an entire semester’s worth of classes down the toilet.” I say, “Now think about what you just said.”

As we sit and talk I stop seeing the permanent record, and start seeing the stories behind the numbers and letters and miscues and sloppy coloring.

Puzzles, every last one of them, and well worth the time it takes to figure them out.