TRANSFER ARTICULATION MAINTENANCE
BUG-MI CONFERENCESEPTEMBER 25, 2015
JON DAVIDSON, DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS
LEE CRUPPENINK, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN-FLINT
BACKGROUND:
Transfer Evaluation Stats:
• 3,200 applicants/year with 5,100 transcripts
• 9,000 new courses/year on average (22,000 so far this year)
• Total database: 108,400 courses from 1,514 institutions
• In the past year: 47,068 courses for 142,023 credits. 73% the size of institutional work
General:
• ~7,100 undergraduate students
• ~2/3 of new degree-seeking undergrads are transfers
• Banner institution since 1998
• Transfer evaluation performed in Admissions
• Implemented transfer articulation in 2005
BACKGROUND: A FEW SPECIFICS ABOUTOUR PRACTICES
• We don’t articulate based on the term the course was taken – all done on the term the evaluation is being performed.
• We use attributes on equivalencies to satisfy gen-ed requirements
• We grant credits equivalent to the original earned (rather than how many our institutional course carries).
BACKGROUND: ACCUMULATED PROBLEMS
• Unrolled work in SHATAEQ
• Unarticulated work that had been rolled to SHATRNS
• Not being able to differentiate courses that had been reviewed from those that had not (SHATATC transfer review indicator) – over 6,000 unknown
• Countless clerical errors
• Bad attributes from botched gen-ed conversion
• Aspirations for more: e.g. proactive building, automated auditing/continuous maintenance
OUR PROCESS: CHALLENGES
• Requires both strong understanding of business processes, as well as data/table structure in Banner.
• Limited availability of IT programmer time
• Lack of direct table access
• Lack of time to do it all at once
• Lack of organization to remember where we left off
OUR PROCESS: MAPPING PROJECTS
• Creating a spreadsheet and common workspace
• Rating by difficulty, priority, sorting by the sum
• Identifying related or pre-requisite projects
• Categorizing as one-time or on-going
• Determining whether to change in-place, or with new effective term
• Linking to scripts or other work from the spreadsheet
OUR PROCESS: MAPPING PROJECTS
• Identify inter-dependencies on projects• Start with easy cleanup, eventually move to complex, aspirational projects
OUR PROCESS: TABLES/FORMS
OUR PROCESS: ACTUAL WORK, TOOLS
• Incremental work done in spurts
• Documentation through continuous email thread
• Actual work accomplished through:
• 75% SQL Scripts
• 20% Access/Excel
• 5% Manual work directly in Banner forms
MAJOR PROJECTS ACCOMPLISHED
• Clean up of unrolled work: 322 active students
• Clean up of unarticulated work
• 1,800 courses
• 666 students affected
• 233 courses with bad grades
• Clean up, and use of transfer review indicator - started with 6,000 with “null” indicator
• Storage and maintenance of comprehensive rejection reasons
• Use of status indicator for ease of identifying the current equivalency record
MAJOR PROJECTS ACCOMPLISHED
• Clean up of unmatched credit hour between transfer course and equivalent
• Redesign of UM-Flint transfer equivalency website
• Import and proactive evaluation of community college catalogs:
• Requested digital catalogs of all 28 Michigan community colleges
• Received 15
• Scraped an additional 5 from websites
• Matched course level on departmental credit (1XX, 2XX, 3XX, 4XX) for ~13,000 equivalencies.
• Repaired and automatically maintain gen-ed attributes
OUR NEXT PROJECTS:
• Synchronizing equivalencies with our institutional catalog:
• Titles
• Attributes
• Deprecated/converted courses
• Automate daily audits
• Proactively identify missed groupings
• Receipt/processing of electronic transcripts (XML/EDI)
Questions, Discussion
Thank you.
Jon DavidsonDirector of Admissions, University of [email protected]
Lee Cruppenink Assistant Director of Admissions, University of [email protected]