Advisers and Petition Submitters Role

Advisers/Submitters Page image

THE IMPORTANT ROLE THAT ADVISERS AND AUTHORIZED PETITION
SUBMITTERS PLAY IN THE STUDENT PETITION PROCESS

The role of Advisers and Authorized Petition Submitters in the student petition process is crucial to be sure that we are providing students with the best possible outcomes for them and their academic careers.

When Advisers and Authorized Petition Submitters work with students to prepare a petition, their responsibility is to be sure that students are providing the required information and documentation to give them the best chance for petition approval. This makes the Senate Committee’s job much easier.

When the Senate Committee reviews a student petition, the information provided by an Adviser/Petition Submitter is very valuable. They are the ones who see and talk with students who are petitioning. By doing that, they have a much better understanding of the students’ extenuating circumstances and how they may have affected their academic performance.

System for Undergraduate Petition Review (SUPR) Updates

The following Academic Units were added to the Pilot for students initiating petitions  in February 2025:

  • Penn State Beaver
  • Penn State DuBois
  • Penn State Shenango
  • Penn State York

Coming Aboard in March 2025 are:

  • Penn State Fayette
  • Penn State Greater Allegheny
  • Penn State Mont Alto

Coming Aboard in April 2025 are:

  • Penn State Brandywine
  • Penn State Lehigh Valley
  • Penn State New Kensington
  • Penn State Scranton

Coming Aboard in May/June 2025 are:

  • Penn State Hazleton
  • Penn State Schuylkill
  • Penn State Wilkes-Barre
  • University College Unit

The following Academic Units will be added to the Pilot for students initiating petitions some time in January 2025.

  • Bellisario College of Communications
  • College of Education
  • College of Nursing
  • College of Engineering

We are pleased to announce that the following Academic Units have been added to the Pilot for students initiating petitions.

  • College of Agricultural Sciences
  • Smeal College of Business
  • College of Arts and Architecture
  • College of Information Sciences and Technology

We have been very busy with training and providing resources for the new process for students initiating petitions. We are very happy with how things have been going so far!! We would like to thank all Pilot participants for their patience as we work through any issues. As of right now, we hope to have all academic units using the new process by the end of May 2025. We have 8 Units on board the Pilot currently:

  • Penn State Abington
  • Penn State Altoona
  • Penn State Erie
  • Penn State Harrisburg
  • Penn State Berks
  • College of Health & Human Development
  • College of the Liberal Arts
  • Division of Undergraduate Studies (DUS)
  • and World Campus

Coming aboard in November are:

  • College of Information Sciences & Technology (IST)
  • College of Arts & Architecture
  • Smeal College of Business

Coming aboard in December are:

  • College of Agricultural Sciences
  • College of Earth & Mineral Sciences
  • Eberly College of Science

All other academic units will be coming aboard in the new year and we will post those as we receive confirmation.

THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone for their patience in using our new process for Students Initiating Petitions!! The process has been well received thus far. We've had great feedback from Advisers, Authorized Petition Submitters, and Students!!

We have created a quick Satisfaction Survey that we will be sending out in the Spring 2025 Semester for those of you who have been using the new process for a while. This will help us to learn areas of strength and those areas where we could be better.

We have altered our Onboarding Schedule based on preferences for Units. Currently, we have 6 units using the new process: WORLD CAMPUS, ALTOONA, HARRISBURG, HEALTH AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, LIBERAL ARTS, DIVISION OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES, and BERKS

OCTOBER 2024: Abington, Erie, and Business

NOVEMBER 2024: Information Sciences & Technology and Arts & Architecture

DECEMBER 2024: Agricultural Sciences, Earth & Mineral Sciences, and Science

JANUARY 2025: Communications, Education, Nursing, and Engineering

FROM FEBRUARY THROUGH MAY 2025 We will begin adding all of the University College Campuses a few at a time.

We hope to have everyone aboard by the end of May 2025. If you see your unit listed and we haven't contacted you yet, you will be contacted a few weeks prior to the semester you're scheduled to begin. We will accommodate your unit's "best time to start" requests at that time. Rest assured that you will have communication in enough time prior to your startup to receive training on your SUPR Queue and to acquire resources like an instructional video, a User Guide, and helpful documents.

The College of the Liberal Arts has now joined the Pilot for students initiating petitions. Soon, we will also be adding Penn State Berks, and the Division of Undergraduate Studies (DUS).

Overall, the process in SUPR has been working well. Submitters like working in their SUPR queues, having the ability to add more input with their tasks, and the fact that they have more information up front that helps them make a more informed recommendation to the Senate committee. The workaround for World Campus petitions is working correctly.

The start of the new process for students initiating petitions has been very interesting. Most is working well, and Submitters have been giving good feedback and suggestions for using their SUPR queues.

The very first thing we learned is that students who are suspended, dismissed, on Leave of Absence, or who haven't been here for a while are not able to connect to the GlobalProtect VPN. This makes them unable to access the petition eForm to initiate a petition. We've met with the Security and DocFinity Teams and there's no way around that. Therefore, for students with those statuses, the Authorized Petition Submitters have been using the new student eForm to initiate the petitions on behalf of the students. This way, the petitions still go into the Unit SUPR Group Queues for them to work their tasks. This has worked well.

Another issue we have encountered with the Pilot is that the process we have in place to move a true World Campus student petition from World Campus on to the academic unit automatically has not been working like we had originally planned. We currently have a workaround in place so that World Campus petitions can keep moving in the system while we go back and do some investigating about which LionPATH field we can use that will get petitions to the correct current academic unit every time.

We are working to incorporate two other UP campuses and one more commonwealth campus into the Pilot. The more samples we have to work with, the more we'll learn.

July 8, 2024, we have launched the new process for students initiating petitions. Thank you to the Pilot Participants at Penn State Altoona, Penn State Harrisburg, and the College of Health and Human Development for agreeing to be the first to test out this new process and provide valuable input for how it works. Also coming aboard in Fall 2024 is the Division of Undergraduate Studies (DUS).

Benefits of using the new process:

  • Students will have a secure place to upload sensitive documents
  • Submitters will have all necessary input from stakeholder offices right away. There'll be no need for the to reach out to other offices for input like a LionPATH summary, information about academic integrity violations, World Campus Adviser input, etc.

We are now ready to move forward with students initiating petitions that will be sent, upon submission, to their academic units. We did one last check, working with the Office of General Counsel to be sure that all elements of the process were in adherence to FERPA. They are. We will now begin trainings for all volunteer pilot participants prior to piloting the new process.

The student petition eForm has been approved for accessibility. A new form has been created that is fully accessible. There are just a few editorial tweaks that need to be done. We will post again here with more updates when we are ready to begin the pilot of students initiating petitions.

Just a quick update: we are patiently waiting for the Accessibility Team to tell us that our student eForm is fully accessible and ready for students to use. We will update everyone with next steps as soon as we hear from them. 

We are one step closer to getting students to initiate their petitions. Final testing has been done for functionality of the process. We are currently working with accessibility specialists to ensure accessibility for the form students will interact with to initiate their petitions. Once we have established that the form is fully accessible, we will move forward with next steps, including a pilot, which will involve a small group of college/campus submitters. We will post new activity here.
Getting students aboard is not happening just yet. We hope to have it in place soon, but most likely not until early in 2024. We will do a piloting phase, gradually adding on units after we check the functionality of the process. Piloting units will be notified when we are ready to implement this, and eventually all submitters will be incorporated and will have training on the Submitter SUPR queue. How it Will Work: The student will meet and talk with their adviser or the authorized petition submitter for their unit to find out if a petition is right for them, what is required, and how it would affect them academically. If it’s decided that a petition is the right way to go, then the adviser/college-campus petition submitter will tell the student what petition type they need to initiate and what documentation to gather together. Then students will be given resources on how to initiate their petitions. Stay Tuned: We will provide more information as we go.
Senate SUPR Staff Members have been testing for SUPR Student Petition Initiation. We are entering the final testing after identified issues have been completely resolved. More to come.
We are still in the pilot phase of SUPR, mainly because of setbacks due to Enterprise IT needing to make University-wide updates, changes within the DocFinity system itself, and waiting for the creation of a new LionPATH call. The new LionPATH call has been created, implemented, and tested. Now we can begin to move forward with other items, moving closer to allowing students to initiate their own petitions. The next items to be worked on are: 1. moving the World Campus and LionPATH queues after student initiation and before the submitter’s queue 2. adding students to be able to initiate their own petitions, upload documentation, and submit to Adviser or Authorized Petition Submitter for the unit where they are enrolled. 3. adding the processes for trauma and CRC petitions We have a meeting with IT this week to discuss next steps. Since we have been discussing these implementation items for many months, we are hoping that the development needed has mostly been completed and we can move quickly into implementation. Slowly but surely we are getting there!!
The SUPR Team has been working on the creation of a new LionPATH call. It is necessary to create a new one to ensure that the most current student information is being pulled into SUPR from LionPATH. This will be very important when we give students the ability to initiate their petitions. SUPR will use this new LionPATH call that determines which Authorized Petition Submitter (at which college or campus) will receive a student’s petition after they initiate. This will provide students with a secure upload for their sensitive and confidential petition documents that are now being sent to Authorized Petition Submitters via email. When the implementation is complete, we will be one step closer to adding students!! Exciting!!
We have had great positive feedback on the new SUPR interface. The changes have certainly alleviated the issues we were having with the form separating from the jobs. Some changes also made it easier to access and re-index petition documents when needed and provided the ability to upload new documents into a petition with ease. We have been working on making some improvements to verbiage in notification emails that weren’t quite right. We have also been working on some small changes that will make a marked impact on how some offices process expedited petitions, and petitions that need to be held for payment before proceeding to the next actor. Petitions are moving along at a good pace in SUPR, and most are being processed from beginning to end in about one week.
We just sent an email to all SUPR Users: We want to make you aware of a change that will be coming soon to the interface of the System for Undergraduate Petition Review (SUPR). Due to some glitches with the separation of the petition form from the job tasks, our SUPR developer has provided a solution to make the system work better and avoid these glitches. This solution will be live effective Wednesday, June 29.

As a result, the interface of the SUPR queues will change. These changes will not affect petition submitters as they do not yet have a SUPR queue. They will affect all other SUPR users who work job tasks in a queue. Many of you have already seen the changes if you have ever worked an Alternative Grading Petition in SUPR. The stated changes for that petition type happened earlier.

The first change you will notice is that the petition form is no longer interactive. You used to see the form as below with links to documents you could click on, and sometimes with buttons at the bottom that you could click on. However, the petition form will now be seen in the same place, but as a static PDF document. There will be no links to documents and no buttons to click on the form.

So now I know you’re thinking where are the documents?

The second change you’ll notice is that you will have a new task titled “View Petition Documents.” When you click on that task, you will see a table that appears below your tasks called “Results.” Here is where you will find all of the documents associated with the petition. You can tell which document area they have been uploaded into by looking at the field in the table called “Document Type.” There will be the petition form, student letter, transcript, all supporting documents, and the registrar document(s) or alternative grading form, depending on the petition type.

When you double-click on any of the documents, they will open up into the DocFinity Document Viewer as they did previously. So, it’s really just a different way to view the documents.

If you have not yet seen the new interface and would like some help working your queue when you get a petition, please contact me (Anna Butler – suprstaff@PennStateOffice365.onmicrosoft.com) and we will set up a Zoom meeting to walk you through it.
  • The System for Undergraduate Petition Review (SUPR) pilot launched on July 14, 2021 with six academic units. 
  • During this time, Senate staff and Enterprise IT worked with a SUPR Focus Group comprised of petition submitters and advisers from several different academic units, stakeholder office staff, and members of the Senate Subcommittee on Undergraduate Petition Review. This focus group was instrumental in providing us with feedback to make SUPR more user friendly, as well as to be sure that we provide all information and documentation needed to facilitate an easy and efficient system for submitting and reviewing student petitions. 
  • Added three more units in September, nine more in October, and 15 more in November, 2021. 
  • All academic units are now using SUPR.
  • March 31, 2022 Alternative Grading Petitions added/being processed in SUPR 
  • June 2022 All Petitions (6,362) previously in Box imported into SUPR
  • June 2022 Form Separation Fix Completed – New SUPR Interface
  • We will be changing the order of some of the queues soon (when students start initiating.)
    • We want World Campus student petitions to go to World Campus first before they go to the petition submitter, and
    • We want the LionPATH queue to be before the petition submitter so that submitters can use LionPATH data to make their recommendation to the Senate committee 
  • Students have been added-Summer 2024, and after consulting with their advisers, will be initiating their petitions and uploading all related documents into SUPR. When students initiate, their petitions will go to their adviser or the authorized petition submitter for the academic unit where they are enrolled. SUPR will provide students with a secure document upload for sensitive documents. Petition documents were being sent by students to their advisers/college-campus petition submitters via email previously.
  • Over 4,100 Petitions Completed with SUPR so far
  • More secure way to provide sensitive and confidential documents
  • More convenient for petition reviewers to be able to review when and from wherever they wish
  • Decreasing processing time for petitions (from 3-5 weeks to 1-3 weeks), with most processed within 1 week.
  • Allows for a more diverse set of reviewers from colleges at University Park and campuses other than UP; moving closer to the principles of One Penn State.
  • Will soon add Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) and Student Care and Advocacy to SUPR for the submission of trauma petitions and petitions for students in the Collegiate Recovery Community.