Tools for Preparing Your Catalog for Accreditation

One of the big tasks in preparing for an accreditation review (or applying for the first time) can be ensuring that your catalog and other documents have all the required information. It varies between accrediting agencies, but most of them have specific (and long!) requirements for exactly what information your catalog needs to contain.

Manually auditing your catalog for this information can be a huge task. If you use Clean Catalog, however, our course catalog software comes with a number of built-in tools and features that can make the process much easier — and give you confidence that your document has everything it needs to have.

Missing Information Reports

One of the most common accreditation prep tasks is checking for missing information. Some accrediting agencies require that all courses list outcomes, or that all degrees have program requirements and course sequencing. Our software makes it easy to quickly generate and run reports to identify missing information, which you can then easily fix. Sample course outcome report showing all courses without outcomes listed.

Quick Search for Required Pages

Looking for Your Specific Accreditation Requirements?

We have catalog accreditation requirements from a number of different agencies on our blog.

Most accrediting agencies have a list of pages that your catalog must contain — academic calendars, listing of faculty with credentials, tuition info, and much more. Our course catalog software makes it easy to search for these pages to ensure that they exist on your catalog and that they've been updated for this academic year.

Site search for specific pages with last updated timestamp.

Additionally, our PDF generation feature has a tool showing any pages on your site that haven't yet been included in your PDF, so you can ensure that both your digital and PDF versions have all the necessary information.

Site search for specific pages with last updated timestamp.

Custom List Pages

In some cases for accreditation you'll want to quickly generate a list of existing content, whether to link to it in your accreditation documents or to use it internally for completeness checks. It could be a list of degrees with their corresponding program codes, or it could be a list of all degree types and what's offered within those.

Our course catalog software makes it easy to generate pages like these; we typically classify all content, such as by degree type and subject, which makes it easy to quickly generate custom list pages without manually curating the content.

Easy-to-Add Addenda

Submitting your documents for accreditation doesn't always align with your catalog production timeline, and sometimes you'll notice something that's missing or incorrect after you've already published your official catalog. In those cases, Clean Catalog makes it easy to create addenda for your catalog, so you can fix any small errors before submitting for accreditation.