The one-millionth degree audit has ran during the 2019 calendar year.

Amber Tiarks, program coordinator for the records and registration department in the Office of the Registrar, said the degree audit was conducted by a staff member for Nicholas Cretors, senior in management information systems on Nov. 4.

“This is the first year since we have been keeping track that we can confirm that we have ran over a million,” Tiarks said. “We had been checking this number periodically, because we knew we were getting close to running a million in the calendar year.”

Karen Terpstra, program coordinator in the Office of the Registrar, said they had been keeping track of the number of degree audits ran in a calendar year since 2017.

“970,000 were ran in 2017 and in 2018, 988,600 were ran,” Terpstra said. “We are on track to run 1.2 million by the end of 2019.”

The degree audit wasn’t run by Cretors, but by a College of Business staff person, Lucy Berger. Berger is a program assistant in the business undergraduate program and was adding Cretors credit for English 150 to his audit.

Terpstra said Cretors got called into the office by his adviser and when he came in they yelled surprise. There was cake waiting for Cretors and he received a small gift card. Several College of Business staff members were there, including Raisbeck Endowed Dean David Spalding

Degree audits can be conducted for students or by students. Not only are students running the audits, but also campus partners are too.

“Part of the reason we hit this mark is that there are a lot more students, and more and more of our campus partners are using audits,” Terpstra said.

The degree audit system is a purchased product, and is the third system Iowa State has used.

“When I first started working here you got one degree audit a semester and it was printed out,” Terpstra said. “And if you wanted another it was $5. When I went to school here it was a hand-written audit. This is the third version of the audit. We have the newest CollegeSource product.”

Recognizing Cretors shows the significance of the tool across campus and how it is being utilized by more people than realized, Tiarks said.

“I was very surprised,” Cretors said. “I didn’t realize how many audits were run a year. I think it’s awesome that the university is able to do so much for its students and process changes to student’s degree plans so quickly.”