Repository navigation
Do not create submissions for students doing a paper (not an ETD) #946
Description
Each semester we have a handful of graduate students begin the ETD process despite not needing to. They are only required to do a "paper", which is not done in the ETDA system. Since we create a submission in ETDA for any student plan in LionPATH, these students will have a submission started in ETDA. We need to find a way to prevent the creation of these submissions.
The LP and Graduate School IT teams are considering a solution that could (according to the LP team):
send the college, academic plan, and the Type when the Type=GRHTHESIS.
However, this is not completed. If we can identify college + academic plan combinations that don't require a thesis/dissertation ("Type" should tell us this), we could prevent these submissions from being created in ETDA.
Hopefully this solution provided by the LP and Graduate School is implemented in the Graduate Program Management System (GPMS) in the form of an endpoint. We already integrate with this system, so it should be easy to adapt.
Activity
ajkiessl commentedon Jul 7, 2026
After reviewing some of our chats with the LP team, seems like they may be able to send the "Type" with the "Student Plan" data if they can get that data from the GPMS. We should ask them if they are able to do this now. Both of our contacts from the LP team are OOO, though, so we may want to come back to this later.
ajkiessl commentedon Aug 7, 2026
The LionPath team will begin sending us a new file (maybe
PE_SR218_GPMSCE?) that contains culminating experience data. There will be five fields:ACAD_PLAN,ACAD_PROG,CE_MILESTONE,CE_START_TERM, andCE_END_TERM. You can take a look at the data mapping here: https://pennstateoffice365.sharepoint.com/:x:/r/sites/GraduateSchool-UniversityLibrariesWorkingGroup/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?action=edit&sourcedoc=%7Bbb1cf808-227a-412c-9dac-c067a2009d66%7D&wdExp=TEAMS-TREATMENT&web=1I the fields we'll need are
ACAD_PLAN,ACAD_PROG, andCE_MILESTONE. TheACAD_PLANandACAD_PROGcan be used to link to the data we get from the student plan imports, andCE_MILESTONEcan be used to determine if a student's plan requires a thesis/dissertation. The thesis/dissertation indicating values should be: "GRHTHESIS" and "GDISSERTAT"; and potentially "GPFTHESIS" but the LP team indicated that "GPFTHESIS" was not yet added to the system.Once the LP team gets this export working, we can start building an importer for this data. We should create a table in the database for this data and import it daily before the student plans are imported. Then use this table to determine if the importing student plans should be imported. We can do this by mapping the academic program and plan fields in the student plan data to the
ACAD_PLANandACAD_PROGfields in the culminating experience data. Then, only import the student plan if it allows for a thesis or dissertation.One caveat: the LP team mentioned that some programs allow multiple culminating experiences. If a program allows a thesis and also something that is not a thesis, we will have no way of knowing which one a student is actually doing. So, we'll just have to assume they are doing a thesis and still create a submission for them.
ajkiessl commentedon Aug 10, 2026
We are waiting to hear back from the LionPath team when this data is ready. It should begin populating in our shared SFTP server.
ajkiessl commentedon Oct 12, 2026
The data is ready. The data can be pulled from the PRD and QNA SFTP buckets. Look for the files prepended with "PE_SR_G_ETD_CE_MLSTN_PRC". The data is updated daily at 12:30 AM.