Tag Usage and Maintenance
Last Modified: Oct 20, 2022
Overview
The functionality of Tags in Spartan Connect supports the quick identification, grouping, sharing, and searching of lists of students throughout the platform. Tags are used to apply an extra layer of grouping to students.
For example, if you are the advisor to all students that are on Major Probation, you may want to sometimes either view, report on, or message all of those. An easy way to accomplish that is to apply a “Major Probation” tag to those students.
However, tags are not always the most appropriate function to use. Tags differ from Categories and Student Lists in the following ways:
Tags | Categories | Student Lists |
|---|---|---|
Usable in Advanced Search and Reports | Usable in Advanced Search and Reports | Usable in Advanced Search and Reports |
Advisors and most staff can create/manage | Created and managed administratively | Almost all staff users can create/manage |
Visible to all staff users | Visible to most staff (some categories are protected and hidden) | Visible only to the creator |
Advisors and most staff can edit/update all tags | System administrators can edit/update categories | The creator of the list can edit/update their own lists |
Etiquette
Because tag assignment and removal is an “all-or-nothing” level of access, there are no system-level restrictions on which tags you can modify. If you’re able to add tags, you can add any tags. If you can remove tags, you can remove any tags. If this is misused or abused, trust in the accuracy of tags is diminished and the effectiveness of the functionality is harmed.
In general, unless you have specific permission to do otherwise, observe the following:
If you did not create the tag, do not modify the tag.
If you did not create the tag or don’t know the purpose of the tag, don’t use the tag as search criteria. This can lead to unexpected outcomes.
Once you are done with your own tag, fully remove the tag from all students to clear it out. If you need help, reach out to SpartanConnect@sjsu.edu.
Only create tags that serve a purpose and fill a need not accomplished by student lists or existing advanced search criteria.
The use of tags will be discontinued if the functionality is abused.
Naming Convention
Tags are visible in Spartan Connect campus-wide, so keeping track of the tags you own is incredibly important. In order to keep tags clean and organized, a standard naming convention is to be used.
The prefix of the tag is the college number and/or department acronym or abbreviation. For departments not within colleges, the college number can be omitted or replaced with your DEPTID. Additional identifiers, term code, or department specific organization can follow. The tag should only have spaces in the tag name portion, not in the prefix. The full format would be templated as follows:
[College Number]-{Department}-[Term Code]-[Additional Identifiers]-{Tag Name}
An example tag could look like 52-ESSC-2222-Interested in Change of Major.
52 is the college number for CoE, ESSC is the department that owns the tag, 2222 is the term code for Spring 2022, and the description Interested in Change of Major means the student was interested in changing their major to one in the CoE. The most important and required parts of a tag are the college number and the department that owns the tag. Tags are listed in alpha-numeric order, so finding your group of tags will be easy.
If you do not know your college number or DEPTID, reach out to SpartanConnect@sjsu.edu
Adding Tags
Tagging from Advanced Search
This section expects that you already have access to use Advanced Search to search for students.
Go to the Advanced Search page and specify your desired search criteria.
With your filters set, click on the Search button to begin the search. Wait for the results to populate on the page.
Within the search results, select the checkboxes for any or all rows. The checkbox in the grey header will select all rows on the first page and the individual checkboxes on each row will select just that row.
If you need to select all rows across all pages of the search results (for more that 100 results), there will be an option to select all rows.
From the Actions menu, select the Tag option.
This will open the tagging overlay and prompt you to specify an existing tag or create a new one.
By clicking into the Enter tags textbox, you can begin typing the name of a tag. If a matching tag exists, it will be displayed in the dropdown and can be selected.
Alternatively, you can specify a new tag.
The tag should appear as this example does, with the small x to the left of the tag.
With your tag(s) specified, click on the Save Tags button to complete the tagging.
A popup in the bottom right corner of the page will show the status of the tagging operation.
Using Tags
Once tags are created (by being added to students) they can be used as filter criteria within searches and reports.
Tags are found within the advanced search filter drawer for Student Information.
By default, students are searched for within tags individually. Meaning students that are tagged with ANY tag specified will be returned in the search results. Using the + symbol to the right of the tag textbox, additional logic options appear.
Use this additional logic to union, intersect, or minus the students returned in the search results based on their tags.
Maintenance
Cleanup
In general, tags are not meant to be permanent and will “fall off” students once that student graduates or becomes inactive in Spartan Connect. As a result, they’re not a reliable search criteria after a few semesters.
Tags will typically be cleaned up each academic year. Any tags that do not follow the naming convention will be removed if their owner cannot be easily identified to make corrections. Tags that appear to be older than a year will be up for removal unless the tag owner specifies otherwise.
Lifecycle
To create a tag, the tag must be added to at least one student. Tags do not persist if there are no students left with that tag applied. A tag disappears after it is removed from the last student or deleted from the tag administration page.