Cognos Reports

Running Cognos Reports

Some faculty and staff have access to IBM Cognos, which is the main report-generating software the College uses. This application can produce detailed reports about a variety of information concerning the College, its students, and its courses and classes.

Enrolled Majors

Division chairs have access to reports of their enrolled majors. To run these reports:

1. Understand that students' academic information is confidential and you should not, without explicit authorization,  share the resulting report with anyone outside the College. You should also not share the report with any students, and not with any faculty or staff members who do not have a legitimate educational or advisory interest in viewing the report.

2. Ensure that you are on a computer on the College's network. (For example, use your College-owned office computer, or your home computer but connected via a VPN and remote-desktop application. For more information, click here.)

3. Go to the website that hosts our Cognos application: https://jzsph-cog1.shc.edu/ibmanalytics/bi/

4. Login with your SHC ID and password.

5. Navigate to your personal folder and find the report you want to run. The title begins with "Students" and then has an abbreviation corresponding to your division's name.

6. Click on the report and select "Run." You have the options of output in Excel, HTML, PDF, and others.

   • Select Excel if you want a spreadsheet you can save. Advantages: Easily searchable and sortable. Disadvantages: Takes a bit longer, and is less wieldy, than HTML.

   • Select HTML if you just want a quick look; this will produce output in new browser-tabs. Advantage: Faster than the other options. Disadvantages: You can only view one page of data at a time; impractical to save the data.

   • Select PDF if you want a PDF you can save. Advantage: Produces a static document that can be easily shared. Disadvantages: Takes a bit longer than HTML, can't be sorted nor edited.

7. The report will prompt you for a Fall year. This is the Fall-semester year of the academic year you want to run the report for. That is to say, by specifying the year of the Fall semester, you will define an academic year running from Fall to Spring to Summer and the students in your majors enrolled in classes in those sessions. For example, if you want to know about your division's majors in the 2021–2022 academic year, select "2021" for the Fall semester. You will receive information about your division's majors in Fall 2021, Spring 2022, and Summer 2022. Any student majoring in your division and registered for at least one class in that academic year will be listed.

8. Then run the report. The output will depend on which of the options—Excel, HTML, or PDF—you selected earlier. Please note that there are two "pages" to the report. These will be concatenated if you selected HTML or PDF, and they will be on two separate spreadsheets in the output workbook if you selected Excel. The first "page" presents lists of students by major and totals. The second page is simply a long list of all the majors.

9. You will see several columns with labels. Some are self-explanatory, but note that "Fall" etc. indicate whether a student was registered for classes in that semester, and "Graduation" indicates whether that student has graduated from the College. Students are counted only if they were registered for at least one class in the academic year you chose.

10. When you're done, be sure to close the browser window(s) that Cognos used or opened.