Understanding Inferred Program Maps

Tiffany Winters

Modified on: Wed, Apr 9, 2025 at 6:07 PM

Overview

PATH: Course Demand Projections > Program Maps

Inferred program maps are a helpful tool to visualize how your institution’s students have historically progressed through a program to obtain their degree.
It is a Coursedog-generated program map within Course Demand Projections (CDP), also known as Scheduling Analytics, based on your student audit data.

We run a calculation on student audit details to determine the average sequence for all of the courses that have been applied to degree audit requirements. And, via this sequence, we create an inferred program map using the average sequence for students across the entire program.
We only reference courses in the courses applied collection, meaning they have successfully counted towards a student’s degree requirements.

This average sequence can be used in place of actual program maps to surface where students are in their degree progression and the number of students that might need a course based on unmet requirements.
Within the “Courses” view of CDP (Academic Operations Analytics > Scheduling > Courses), you can see three places where Inferred Program Maps can be used, depending on whether they have been associated in the “Student Mapping” tab:
1. Requirements
2. Students Overview
3. Time Conflicts

The “Requirements” overview identifies all requirements and their associated programs that contain the given course as an option to satisfy that requirement.
Inferred maps will be referenced to identify whether the course is present, and whether it is a “may take” or a “must take”.

The Students Overview and associated Completion Matrix references the requirements that belong to an inferred map. It will compare the order of requirements to a student’s courses applied data to determine which requirements have been met and which are still needed.
You’ll be directed to the “Completion Matrix” if you click on a row of students within the “Students Overview”.

The default time conflicts will be based off of which “must take” courses belong to the same terms in the inferred program map

Even if your institution chooses to leverage actual program maps to fuel CDP insights rather than inferred program maps, inferred program maps can be a useful reference when revising your actual program maps.
For example, you might realize that the majority of your students are successfully taking a certain course to meet a given requirement. It could be a good idea to include this course in your actual program map.

The key word in “Inferred Program Maps” is “Inferred.” Coursedog will interpret your student audit data to create a program map; however, it is possible that the system will not interpret all of your requirements in the same way that you or your degree audit system would.
Because of this we have introduced a number of features that will enable you to revise your inferred program maps so that they more accurately reflect program requirements.
Inferred program maps are highly configurable and can be adjusted to reflect your institution-specific program requirements.
See a guide for managing inferred program maps.

The number of students (shown below) lists the student dataset the “Courses” and “Requirements” details are based on.

“Courses” indicates all of the courses in your degree audit that have been applied towards the given requirement.
The percentage reflects how frequently the course has been used to count towards the given requirement.

Coursedog identifies similar requirement IDs and combines these into a single requirement.
In order to view all of the child requirements that the system has rolled into a single requirement, click the requirement to open the toggle. You will be able to see all requirements that have rolled into the parent requirement.
Within a requirement, courses are joined by “or”. Meaning that any of the courses could be taken to meet the given requirement.
Between requirements, courses are joined by “and”. Meaning that courses must be taken from both requirements in order to satisfy each requirement.