Using Mass Packaging with Multiple Careers

Mass Packaging can also accommodate students with multiple careers. If a student with multiple careers—one career for the first term and another career for subsequent terms—is selected for Mass Packaging, the student is associated with multiple packaging plans based on their multiple careers and the selection criteria (packaging equations) associated with that career's packaging plan. Mass Packaging processes the student for the first career based on the processing order of the packaging plan, then awards for the second career based on the processing order of the packaging plan. The processing order for the packaging plans determines which packaging plan is used and, therefore, which career is packaged first. Awards made using a Career 1 packaging plan are passed on as passive awards to be included as part of any subsequent awarding for Career 2.

Note:

Review the processing order for all your packaging plans to ensure that Mass Packaging selects the packaging plans, and, therefore, the careers, in the order you want. You enter the processing order on the Packaging Plan page, in the Processing Order field.

If you have students who have multiple careers (Career 1 and Career 2) and some students should be packaged for Career 1 first while others should be packaged for Career 2 first, you would need to run these two groups of students in separate Mass Packaging runs, changing the processing order on your packaging plans for each run. The packaging plan's processing order determines the order in which a career is packaged because the packaging plans are tied to careers.

You cannot allow students with posted awards in multiple careers to enter a Mass Packaging run to be selected for packaging plans for multiple careers. In live mode, Mass Packaging aborts without any messages if this is allowed. In simulation mode, your packaging results do not appear correct because the previous career's awards are not posted in simulation mode and, therefore, are not considered as existing awards when the second career is packaged. A student can have posted awards in multiple careers and go through Mass Packaging using one packaging plan for one career at a time.

Posted awards for multiple careers means the student has been awarded at least one award for Career 1 and at least one award for Career 2 and those awards are posted before the student is processed by Mass Packaging. To package students with posted awards in multiple careers using Mass Packaging, you should keep track of these students and only process them in Mass Packaging for one career at a time. The way to process students for one career at a time is to select the students, then make all but one of their careers invalid on the Mass Packaging by Students page or Institutional Mass Packaging by Student page. Assign packaging plans to the students. Then run Mass Packaging in simulation mode and review the results. If the results are correct, run Mass Packaging in live mode. This causes the awards to be posted for the first career. Now repeat the process for a second career.

Awards for the first career must posted to be considered as existing awards for any subsequent career's packaging. When you run Mass Packaging in simulation mode with more than one career, when the second career is being packaged, the simulated awards packaged for the first career are not considered existing awards because they are not yet posted.