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 Michigan-Flintjdavidso@umflint.edu

Lee Cruppenink Assistant Director of Admissions, University of Michigan-Flintleecrupp@umflint.edu