According to new numbers out from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center there were nearly 250,000 fewer students enrolled in college than a year ago. Now more than ever, it’s critical for colleges and universities to take a proactive approach to solving today’s enrollment challenges. The way in which we interact and serve our students can largely play into this. At the same time we have an opportunity to change our process and technologies to best suit the ever-changing needs of today’s students.
Universities process thousands of transcripts every year for new and returning applicants from high schools, colleges, and other universities. It’s the responsibility of the Admissions and registrar department to process these transcripts and ensure that students are meeting the necessary requirements. They have to check each course on the transcript and match it to an equivalent course which informs the student on which courses will transfer over.
It can be cumbersome to go through each course manually and match it to the university’s SIS or CRM system. Luckily, we have the solution to this exhaustive manual process. We also can extract high school course work. This allows you to start thinking grander in scale. Are you targeting the correct high schools? How do certain high school courses equate to what major you put them in and the success within that major? Are these students staying enrolled? Graduating? Getting a job in the industry? By having access to the data within a transcript, the possibilities are endless.
We provide a business solution which intelligently extracts data from transcripts and automatically matches each course. This reduces the need for manually reviewing every course on a transcript greatly.
There are four main steps in the solution:
Classification
The first step in the process is capturing the document and classifying it. Any document can be captured into the software via email, file directory import, or a scanner. Once it is captured into the system, the software can automatically determine that the document is a transcript based on key values or the template of a transcript. This simplifies separating out transcripts from other document types and reduced the need to manually separate documents out. It is also possible to separate out multiple transcripts if they are submitted as one document. We can also further identify the transcript as coming from a High School, International school, Military, or a Transfer Credit transcript. After the document has been successfully classified, the software moves onto the next step.
Extraction
The main data points on a transcript is the university that produced the transcript, the student’s information, and the course information. With our Intelligent Data Extraction software, we can identify the source university, extract student information and match it to your university’s student interface, and extract various course information. We can extract various course information such as term, subject, course ID, grade, and credit information for each course. With our solution, we can account for various transcript formats that are seen in the Higher Education realm which provides accurate results less chance for user correction which is explained in the next step.
Correction
Once information has been extracted from a transcript, it may require a user to validate and correct information that was extracted. The user would correct extracted information that did not pass your university’s validation rules or data that was not extracted correctly. With Ephesoft’s user interface, we can easily identify which data points were not extracted correctly and what needs to be corrected by a user. This reduces the need for a user to identify which data points need to be rectified reducing overall processing time.
Course Equivalency Check
The final piece is checking for course equivalency per each course. This means that the solution will automatically compare each course on the transcript against your university’s course information to find a course that exists in your university. Once all the data has been extracted and corrected by a user in the previous steps, the metadata from the transcript is exported out to Perceptive Content and a Transcript form is created. All the data is mapped automatically to this form providing an easy and consistent viewing of the transcript and all associated data.
If an equivalent course is found, then nothing needs to be done and the course is marked as successfully matched on the newly created form. If an equivalent course is not found, the system will inform a user by marking the course as needing attention. A user will then be given an option to manually enter the equivalent course information, ignore the course if necessary, or have the solution create an equivalent course record in your university’s course equivalency data records for future courses.
Once all these steps are complete, the transcript can be considered as fully processed and will be stored in Perceptive Content for easy access in the future. This process removes the need for a human to spend time reviewing every transcript and entering the data manually while reducing the chance for mistakes to occur. It provides a quicker way to process the student’s information providing a fluid experience for students and your Admissions and Registrar office. At the end of the day, we allow your staff to spend their time performing meaningful work with your prospective and current students rather than time wasted in repetitive and mundane tasks. By doing so, enrollment numbers will increase, and your students will receive a much better experience with your school.