A Peek into the Past: Maintaining student records in the '70s

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

The following story is the first 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.

On August 16, 1974, I began my career in the registrar business as a senior clerk in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) records section of the Registrar's Office. All registration then was in-person and busy. The supervisor of my section didn't have time to do any training. On my desk was a large computer printout, a tray of registration cards, a red inkpad, and a stamp that read "SMF." My instructions were simple: If a card in the tray belonged to a student on the printout, stamp the card; if not, don't. When you finish with a tray, get the next tray. If the phone rings, don't answer it.

I learned that SMF stood for Student Master File, but I had no clue what that was. I spent the rest of the day stamping cards SMF. I went home at the end of the day with red ink on the side of my hand and on my shirt sleeve and wondering how long I'd last.

Eventually, I learned that SMF was the computerized record of students who started at the University beginning fall quarter 1972. The transcripts were produced on microfiche every two weeks. Transcripts for degree-seeking students who started before fall 1972 were maintained manually, handwritten in ink on special linen transcript paper. SMF stamped on a registration card let the records clerks know they didn't need to print the courses on the linen transcript.

At the time, the registration process had not changed too much since 1948 when a system using 80-column computer cards and IBM unit record equipment was developed to help deal with the influx of many thousands of returning World War II veterans. (What is now the Office of Information Technology at the University began in the late 1940s as a part of the Registrar's Office.) Each student was given a card with basic information and punched into 80 columns: ID number, name, college code, and a few other elements. Students would go around campus to academic departments and college offices to pick up cards for the courses they wanted to take. These cards had the basic course information, subject, course number, section number, and so on printed and punched on them. The number of cards printed for each section matched the section capacity, so a course with 25 seats would have 25 cards produced.

Once the cards were gone, the section was full. Students brought their individual student card, the cards for the courses they wanted to take, and another card on which they had written the courses, to either the Registrar's Office on the first floor of Morrill Hall or to the remote outpost in Johnston Hall where students in CLA and the Graduate School could register. Clerks would take in the packets of cards, making sure that all of the necessary cards were present, and write out a fee statement on a multi-part form. The packet of cards was paper-clipped together and put into boxes. Students received a carbon copy of their registration card and the fee statement.

The typical wait for a student could well be more than an hour. (This coming after the student had traveled across campus picking up the course cards from multiple locations.) Before being sent for processing, each set of registration cards was examined by an assistant supervisor to make sure that all of the cards were present. Boxes of cards went to the unit record section of the central IT department, where the sets of cards were processed, creating entries on the Active Student File (ASF), which contained demographic and current course registration information for all active students, including those not on the SMF. Eventually, the registration cards wound up in trays, waiting for an unlucky records clerk to compare them to names on a printout and stamp some SMF.