What does your institution do for those that attended college for 6 years, and graduated in 1996, but they would like to be reconized as the class of 1994, the class they would have graduated with if they completed their degree in 4 years? Katie Kupiecki Manager of Development Information Systems Aquinas College

I would store 1994 in the "class of" field in the education relationship, and put 1996 in the "date graduated" field. "Date graduated" is one of those fuzzy date fields, which means you can enter "1996", "5/96", or "5/31/96" according to how specific your information is. Mark F. DeWitt, Database Manager College of Engineering University of California, Berkeley [Email Removed]

Ditto. It's one of those siutaitons where they have created this "class of" field for specifically this purpose. The "graduation date" is official and cannot or should not be altered. Since we are dealing with real human beings and you want to do what you can to keep them in the fold, you make these kinds of adjustments to their constituent information. Peter Gulka Records Administrator - NAIT Alumni & Development Office Trailer 3 - 11762 106 St Edmonton AB T5G 2R1 email: [Email Removed] ph: (780) 471-7827 fax: (780) 471-8400

When communicating to our alumni about this issue, we call this their "preferred reunion year." As others have stated, we store this year in the "Class Of" field. Naturally, the Alumni Office uses this field exclusively in grouping people for events. In Development, we also use this field when organizing Class Campaigns. We use the "Date graduated" field as the historically accurate date when they completed their degree requirements. We query on this date when asked for specific stats from the Dir. of Research, or when a department needs to survey a specific class for academic accessment data. Shirley Hardin Director of Annual Giving/Database Manager Ouachita Baptist University