Making Sure Your Student Data Imports Run Smoothly

20 January 2022

TECH TALK SESSION

As Support Specialist Jorge Rodriguez pointed out in this week’s Tech Talk, one of the most frequent subjects of tickets is imports. Specifically, troubleshooting when errors pop up. That’s why Jorge went over some of the most common causes of errors during the import process, which can pop up for both automatic imports coming from your institution’s SIS system or manual imports done by center managers for things such as tutor assignments or user groups.

About Imports
Let’s start with a few important things you should know about imports in Accudemia. Any data that can be imported into Accudemia can also be entered manually, but it’s usually much easier and quicker to import it! These imports are done with CSV files, which can contain data in one file for multiple imports, and do not need all columns mapped for an import to be successful.

Accudemia imports are handled through a program called ADX, which can run jobs on-demand or on an automatic schedule. If an import fails, a notification can be emailed to you or another stakeholder, and you can also view the import jobs in Accudemia. Click on each job to see more details on what happened and why a job failed.

Common Causes of Errors
Our Support Team is always happy to help, but to save yourself some time, take a look at these common errors and see if any of them apply to your situation in the event of a failed import:

  • Was there a format or accepted values violation? We especially see this with the ID column. Remember that the User ID must be validated by a MASK ID and must be unique for each user.
  • Is there an active semester? The new term must be set up to start accepting course and enrollment data. If there is not an active term, be sure to set one up, or contact your institution’s IT department.
  • Are there violations of relationship specifications? This is when there is a discrepancy between two related items in Accudemia, such as Classes and Courses. In this example, each Class or section can only belong to one Course or subject area. If the import tries to match a Class to more than one Course, it will fail.
  • Have you exceeded the maximum number of active students in your account? Depending on your subscription level, your account is allowed a certain number of active students at any one time. If you exceed that limit with an import, the job may fail. Check with your account rep if you need to increase your limit or have any questions about it!

Let us know if you have any questions regarding your imports! We hope this article was helpful for you.

Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for 1/18/2022 for the weekly Accudemia sessions. Held every Tuesday at 1 pm EST, Accudemia clients can join a session to learn about a quick, useful topic from one of our Support Specialists. Each week, we’ll follow up Tech Tip Tuesday with a blog recapping that week’s topic. If you’re an Accudemia client and would like to join us for the next session, just visit
https://www.engineerica.com/accudemia-weekly-sessions/.