Managing Inferred Program Maps

Tiffany Winters

Modified on: Wed, Apr 9, 2025 at 8:59 PM

Overview

PATH: Course Demand Projections > Program Maps

Check out Inferred Program Maps for an overview.
Inferred program maps can be generated quickly and efficiently with little configuration.
Based on how students are completing requirements, you can merge, add, reorder, or modify requirements in your inferred program maps to better align with the path students must take to successfully complete their program.
Editing Inferred Program Maps is optional, but if you plan to use inferred program maps instead of actual program maps within student mapping, or a combination of inferred program maps and actual program maps, it is recommended that you review, edit, and lock inferred program maps. This will help to improve the quality of your insights.
You should modify inferred maps with the goal of aligning them as closely with your actual program requirements as possible.
Editing options include locked/unlocked, reset, remove, and merge/unmerge. Additionally, users are able to reorder and add requirements, add terms, and duplicate custom requirements.

You can generate inferred program maps by navigating to Settings > Data Calculations and selecting “Calculate Inferred Program Maps”.
See “When to Generate” and “Configuration” below for items to consider before selecting “Calculate Inferred Program Maps”.

Admins should generate inferred program maps during the implementation if they plan to leverage these instead of or in addition to actual program maps. Your implementation resource will help with this.
Maps should not be re-generated that frequently, if at all. Given the edits that must be made to inferred program maps, it might be easier to make ad hoc adjustments based on curriculum changes instead of re-generating the map from scratch.
Note that regenerating inferred program maps will overwrite all data of unlocked maps, including any edits that have been made, based on the current student audit data in the system.

Consider the following when generating inferred program maps:

Set the total credit limit for a program map.
- It is recommended that you set this above the total credits required of a program. This will capture the requirements of students that graduated with additional credits and ensure core program requirements are not missed.
- Requirements can be removed later.
Set the number of courses per term.
- Set the average number of courses students take per term.
- This can be edited on a program by program basis later by moving requirements across terms.
Student count threshold
- Set the minimum number of students that must have met a given requirement to be included in the map.
- This filters out requirements based on a small dataset that may be a data entry error or a historical exception.
Remove the following requirement names, goal names, and goal types
- Select any data you would like excluded from the maps.
- For now, CDP cannot predict minor requirements on their own, so it is advised to remove these.
Once set, select “Calculate Inferred Program Maps” to generate maps. These will then be visible within AOA > Scheduling > Program Maps.

To edit an inferred program map, navigate to Course Demand Projections > Program Maps and click to open the map you wish to edit.
Note that all changes must be saved in order to preserve your edits.
To do this, click the “Save” button in the upper-right hand side of the screen.

Locking an Inferred Program Map will prevent any edits from being made.
It will also prevent the inferred map from being overwritten if inferred maps are regenerated within calculations.
As soon as you finalize your edits to a map, you should lock it.
It can always be unlocked for future edits.

Removing requirements will delete them from the inferred program map. This can be helpful if the inferred map captures a requirement that not all students in the program must take, like a minor or exemption.
In order to remove requirements, first select a requirement.
When you select a requirement, you can choose the parent requirement, which will auto-select all of the child requirements. Or, you can select any of the child requirements that have been rolled up into the parent requirement.
A red “Delete” option will be available

Merging requirements will introduce “or” logic that is interpreted as optional to take. For example, if the inferred program map had originally separated two optional courses into separate requirements, you can merge them into a single requirement to indicate that either course will satisfy the parent requirement.
Unmerging requirements will introduce “and” logic that is interpreted as “required to take.” This can be helpful if students must take different courses to meet separate requirements, and the inferred program map interprets them as a single requirement.
In order to merge or unmerge requirements, first select a requirement. Then, select “Merge Selected” above.
See “Remove” above for guidance on selecting a parent or child requirement.

Users have the ability to add requirements to inferred maps. This can be helpful if a new requirement has been recently added and is not reflected in the map.
The course select will pull from the active curriculum course inventory.
You will need to add terms before adding requirements.

You can add a requirement by:

Clicking “+ Add Requirement”.
Filling out the “Add new requirement” modal. Users must set a requirement name, course(s), term, and course distribution:

The course distribution must sum to 100% in order to save the requirement.
Courses within manually added requirements will similarly be treated with an “Or” conditional.

Select “Save”.
If you’d like to edit a custom requirement, simply hover over it and select “Edit”.

To duplicate a custom requirement, hover over it and select “Duplicate”.