Setup Considerations: Course Smart Lists

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of course smart lists. It explains:

Why to set them up.

How they fit into the rest of Workday.

Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.

Security requirements and business process configurations.

Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.

For full configuration details, see task instructions.

What It Is

Smart lists are a way to group courses by their common properties. Use these groupings to reduce time and effort during curriculum management.

Business Benefits

You can use smart lists when creating academic requirements and policies to:

Easily group courses by criteria.

Reduce manual data entry.

Prevent errors.

Use Cases

Identify academic, major, or graduation requirements.

Define undergraduate and graduate courses.

Group courses by tags such as athletes and veterans.

Apply eligibility rules to a large number of courses.

Identify courses that satisfy the same academic requirement.

Include or exclude courses from GPA calculations.

Exclude courses that you don't want evaluated in a student's Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP).

Questions to Consider

Questions	Considerations
What metadata do you already have about your courses and curricula?	Prepare yourself with this information to save time and effort when you create smart lists: A naming convention. How you assign numbers to courses at your institution. Academic unit your smart list belongs to. Whether you want your smart list to include courses from academic units subordinate to the selected academic unit. Course tags you want to associate with your smart list. Course subjects you want to include. Which academic level your smart list is for.
What smart lists do you want to exclude from your other smart lists?	You can exclude a smart list from another smart list. Once a smart list excludes another smart list, you can't exclude the latter from any other smart list. Example: You exclude the Honors Art Courses smart list from the All Art Courses smart list. No other smart lists can exclude the Honors Art Courses smart list.
What courses can you pull into smart lists?	You can pull in any current courses that meet the criteria of the smart list.
What criteria define a smart list?	You can define smart lists by course: Academic level. Academic unit. Number range. Subject. Tags. When you change the subject, number, or tag of a course, Workday moves it automatically to the appropriate smart lists.

Recommendations

Use meaningful and unique smart list names and descriptions so you can easily identify them in prompts. Example: Upper Division Mathematics Courses (300 - 499).

Requirements

Before setting up smart lists, verify that you have published courses.

Limitations

Workday doesn't currently support:

Future-dated courses. Workday doesn't automatically pull future-dated courses into the appropriate smart list when that date becomes the current academic period. To include these courses, access the

Edit Smart List

task and resubmit the smart list.

Alphanumeric ranges such as MATH101A-MATH101C. To include everything within a range, specify them individually. For example: MATH101A, MATH101B, MATH101C.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

Domains	Considerations
Set Up: Student Eligibility Rules in the Academic Advising functional area	Enables you to create and configure smart lists.
View: Smart Lists in the Academic Advising functional area	Enables you to view smart lists.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

No impact.

Integrations

No impact.

Connections and Touchpoints

Feature	Considerations
Eligibility Rules	Use smart lists to select a large number of courses easily when you create Course Requirement and Unit Requirement eligibility rules. When configuring smart lists for eligibility rules, we recommend not including courses from course equivalency groups with an equivalency usage of enrollment requisite. Instead, add them as individual courses to prevent students from incorrectly meeting eligibility rule requirements.
Academic Records	Use smart lists to exclude certain courses when calculating GPA policies.
Academic Advising	Use smart lists to identify which courses students must take to complete their programs of study at your institution.
Financial Aid	Students must meet certain Satisfactory Academic Progress requirements in order to receive financial aid. Use smart lists to exclude courses from a student's Satisfactory Academic Progress.

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.