A Peek into the Past: Maintaining student records in the '70s (Part 2)

By Jeff von-Munkwitz-Smith, Ph.D.
Assistant Vice President & University Registrar, Boston University

The following story is the second of a two-part installment about managing student records in the 1970s. Going forward, issues of News & Notes will include additional entertaining stories of times gone by in the student finance/financial aid and records office. Hopefully, you will find it interesting to read about how much our offices have changed over the years! If you have a story you'd like to share, please send your submission to epaxton@umn.edu.

The Student Master File (SMF) was a batch system. Updates were applied once a week. Some, including registrations, came from the Active Student File (ASF); others were based on a kind of blind data entry by records clerks. To change a grade, for example, you entered the student ID and name, information about the course, the old grade, and the new grade. If any of the student or course information, including the old grade, didn't match exactly what was in the SMF, the update wouldn't be applied, and the transaction would appear on an error report.

Records maintenance responsibilities were divided up alphabetically by college. For example, my colleague kept the records of College of Liberal Arts (CLA) students whose last names were in the range Mea-N. At the end of the cancel/add period each quarter, records clerks would receive the registration cards and any cancel/add forms for their students. For those not stamped SMF, the clerks would add the term information and courses to the linen transcripts, which they kept in binders in their desks. Future changes to student registrations might require the use of the electric eraser.

Later in the quarter, we'd receive printouts of the course information on the ASF for each student, and we'd compare that information to the accumulated registration and cancel/add forms to an audit of the student bills to ensure students were billed properly, as all of the bills were calculated by hand.

When grades came in at the end of the quarter, we would transfer the grades from the grade sheets to the course cards that students turned in when they registered, using a No. 2 pencil to fill in the appropriate grade in the correct bubble on each card. The cards would then go to the Unit Record section of central IT for processing, and the grades would be added to the SMF. Once all the grades were processed, we'd receive a printout of all grades for each student and we'd add the grades to the linen transcripts. When grade changes came in, we'd once again use the electric eraser.