Registrar’s Office Audit
Westwood College
Wendy Kilgore, Ph.D.
Senior Consultant
September 23-24, 2009
Consultation Summary and Project Goals
During a two day campus visit with Westwood College, Senior AACRAO
Consultant Wendy Kilgore conducted an audit of the Westwood College
Online office of Registration and Records. The audit focused on:
−
Processes, procedures and policies.
−
Organizational structure.
−
Staffing levels, responsibilities, and cross-training of duties.
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The use of technology within the office.
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A focus on transfer credit practice processes in the registrar’s office.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Observations:
1.
Westwood College Online has undergone a significant change in
leadership in the last few year and has experienced rapid growth in its
enrollment.
2.
The college adopted PeopleSoft for student records, registration and
financial aid in early 2006.
−
The traditional campuses of the college have not adopted PeopleSoft and
continue to use a legacy system incompatible with PeopleSoft.
−
This results in difficulty in serving hybrid students effectively.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Observations:
3.
In general, staff and management within the unit maintain a positive
attitude towards their responsibilities and want to help students.
−
4.
However, there is a perception that appears to be prevalent among some
staff and some management that the unit is the scape goat for issues in the
college yet is also the unit that takes on responsibilities outside of their
scope.
From a student self-efficacy perspective, there is a culture within the unit
of doing as much as possible on behalf the student.
−
This is potentially detrimental to the student’s educational experience.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Observations:
5.
Further, this culture increases the amount of work performed in the unit
without apparent added value to the organization.
6.
Staff and management within the unit want to see more automation and
an implementation of more student self-service.
7.
Based on interviews with staff members within the unit, the majority of
staff time is spent doing manual processes.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Observations:
8.
There appears to have been a gradual creep in responsibilities over the
last few years to where the unit has assumed responsibilities previously
within the domain of student services.
– This has resulted in an increase in work load for registration and records staff.
– It also appears to have resulted in an unclear boundary of responsibilities for
new students between student services and the registration and records unit.
• However, some registration and records staff commented that these additional
duties break up the monotony of their regular duties.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Observations:
9.
Policy and procedure interpretation varies from one unit functional area to
another.
– For example: during the two day consulting visit at least three different
records retention periods were stated as the “official” time required to retain a
record.
10. Staff expressed both a lack of training and cross-training and a desire for
that training within the unit functional divisions, across the unit as a
whole, and across the college.
– This is extreme in some instances where one person within a unit functional
area is the only person in the organization that knows how to do a particular
necessary task.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Observations:
11. The “why” of procedures/practices is not generally understood by staff.
– There appears to be a “because we have always done it this way” or
“because we were told to do it this way” level of understanding among the
majority of staff.
12. Current practice restricts all students to just the most basic of self-help.
– This practice results in more work for staff including, according to staff,
processing about 9,000 schedule changes each term for about 4,700
students. This is in addition to the initial registration for each student.
– Anecdotally, WCO students want to be able to help themselves.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Observations:
13. There appears to be serious technical issues with the imaging system
resulting in the majority of work by CDCC staff involving manual
intervention.
– With the move to E-SARs and other increases in imaging demand including
archiving, these errors are going to cause a considerable backlog.
14. Papers containing personally identifiable information including SSN,
name, DOB and address are being stored on desks and in unlocked
desks because of the backlog of filing.
15. There are inaccuracies in the program course requirements stored in
PeopleSoft.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Recommendations:
The recommendations included in this section ideally should be implemented
as soon as possible to improve student service and reduce the redundant
workload for staff. However, several of the recommendations will also require
a culture shift within the unit towards one of embracing improving student selfefficacy. While such a shift is not easy it will result in better service and a
better experience for students.
1.
Develop a clear definition of scope of responsibilities for the unit and
communicate that with the rest of the college.
2.
Shift the responsibility for finalizing enrollment paperwork back to the
new student staff.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Recommendations:
3.
Shift the responsibility for selecting courses for students back to student
advisors until self-service registration is available.
– This should enable advisors to work with students to select the courses that
they wish to take instead of having staff make the decisions regarding which
general education courses to register the student in without the student
expressing a preference.
4.
Adopt and implement regular unit training and cross training for
procedures, practice and technology.
5.
Implement regular meetings within the unit and only cancel those
meetings under unusual circumstances.
– Involve staff in the agenda for the meetings.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Recommendations:
6.
Combined with a clear communication plan for students outlining selfservice expectations and options, implement the assistant director’s plan
for additional student-self service capabilities, including:
– Registration
– Drop/add/withdrawal
– Official transcript requests
– Course schedule access for future terms
– Online payment
– Book ordering
– Fix the official transcript request function
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Overall Recommendations:
7.
Resolve the technical issues with the imaging solution.
8.
Make it a high priority to remove all paperwork with personally identifiable
information from non-secure areas.
9.
Confirm accuracy of program course information in SMART so as to
foster the use of this information by staff for degree audits and student for
self-registration and advising.
10. If possible, adopt a single ERP for both campus and web based students.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
Processes/Procedures:
1.
Almost all registration and records processes are manually intensive,
some primary examples include:
– Printing and filing enrollment forms from the imaging database.
– Registering all students each term.
• 8 of 10 weeks a term spent registering students, correcting registrations or
dropping/withdrawing students
– Hybrid registration requiring the manipulation of two separate databases.
– Official transcript batch printing is not working, printed individually.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
– The creation and maintenance of a separate transfer equivalency
spreadsheet containing information already in the database.
– The printing and manual processing of degree check sheets even though the
completed and remaining coursework resides in a single area in the database.
• The degree data in PeopleSoft may or may not be accurate depending on the
program
– All student schedules are checked manually one at a time for any drops, adds
or withdrawals or course changes 2-3 times each term to determine if a
change needs to be made to the expected graduation date.
– Complete withdrawals and course drops require manual intervention in both
PeopleSoft and e-college.
• The PeopleSoft transaction does not automatically update e-college.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
– Proficiency exam scores recorded in e-college not automatically uploaded and
stored in PeopleSoft.
– Data imaging requires the manual intervention for approximately 25-60% of all
incoming documents.
– Data imaging batch processes not working.
– IPEDS extract/reporting created by staff and data is manually scrubbed.
– Repeated course grades processed one student at a time.
– Last date of attendance not always accurately ported back to SMART from ecollege so each student drop must be reviewed manually.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
– Re-registering all students in a course who failed a course the prior term is
also a one student at a time process.
• Approximately 2000 students must be processed in a 3-5 day window between
terms, each term.
• Some faculty get grading extensions resulting in an “F” grade being posted well
after a student has started the next course.
– Mid-term students not differentiated sufficiently in PeopleSoft and as a result
require manual intervention to make sure a dropped course is not recorded as
a withdrawal.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
2.
As stated earlier, registration and records staff are doing the work of what
used to be the responsibility of academic advisors.
– They review the academic program for each student (new and continuing),
manually cross off courses on a check sheet, and select courses for the next
term on behalf of students.
– They then look for open courses and then schedule students or wait until a
course is opened.
– The lack of any interaction with students during the course selection process
appears at least anecdotally to be linked directly to the large number of
course changes requested.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
3.
Furthermore, staff appear to be doing some work that used to be the
responsibility of new student staff
– All enrollment application materials being reviewed by registration and records
staff for completeness and accuracy.
– It is unclear who is responsible for collecting corrected information from the
student.
– It is also unclear as to when exceptions are appropriate to the requirement
that a enrollment file must be complete and accurate before registration.
• Staff have been asked to make exceptions to this requirement.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
4.
Unit staff are asked to make calls for the financial aid office to students
with missing information but the apparent reverse assistance does not
happen.
– This takes a significant amount of staff time
– Staff who connect with students by phone just transfer them to financial aid
because staff are unsure of what documentation is missing.
– Staff are still expected to meet the unit SLA’s even on days when they are
doing significant work to help financial aid.
– This practice in particular has caused considerable grief and bad feelings
among the staff.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
5.
Paper filing estimated by staff to be 5-13 months backlogged
–
As stated earlier, this results in personally identifiable student information
including SSN, name, DOB and address being stored on and in staff desks
without locks
– Non-college employees have unsupervised access to these areas after
normal business hours
– Staff find it difficult to get the basic supplies needed for making student folders
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
6.
Manually intense and complicated re-entry procedures, hybrid student
registration and other daily transactional processes appear to consume
the majority of each day for both the registrar and assistant registrar.
–
Both the registrar and assistant registrar estimated they receive about 500
emails a day.
– Both commented that they wish they had more time to work with staff on
training and regular meetings.
– Staff also expressed a desire to have more effective interactions with their
managers.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
7.
The communication of changes in procedures appears to be completed in
a piecemeal fashion because of the lack of time dedicated to meeting as
a team or sub-teams.
–
Staff regularly commented that the only way they hear something has
changed is that one staff member hears it and decides to share it with others.
– The unit does not appear to have regular meetings or widely shared
communication with staff to inform and discuss changes to procedures or to
share a vision and mission for the unit.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
8.
Exception reports are almost non-existent and those that do exist are
only accessible by a couple of people.
– The lack of regular data exception extracts or queries contributes to a pattern
of last minute data processing and needing to check each and every student
rather than just the exceptions.
9.
Registration staff spend a considerable amount of time waiting and
double checking for courses to be built in order to be able to register
waiting students in those courses.
– Course building sometimes occurs even after the term has started.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
10. The add-on faculty database used to assign faculty workload instead of
PeopleSoft pulls data from PeopleSoft but not always accurately.
– This results in the need to manually compare each course in PeopleSoft to
the faculty database.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
Policies:
11. There does not appear to be a disaster recovery policy outside of
centralized data recovery and backup.
– The existing policy does not cover paper documents.
– May not cover the imaging system.
12. SLA’s not regularly reviewed for timeline appropriateness.
– Staff regularly commented that the timelines are difficult to meet with the
workload that they have now.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
13. No formal student email use policy.
– Practice is not to email anything to a student except the college issued
account without specific written permission.
14. There does not appear to be formal records retention policy for the unit.
– Staff mentioned that there was a records retention requirement by the
accrediting agency but could not find that requirement.
– The electronic records storage plan did include reference to the retention
requirements from the Colorado Division of Private and Occupational Schools.
This document does not specify the need for paper documents but that is the
general understanding within the unit.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
15. According to staff, it is assumed that all full-term students without transfer
credits require remedial math and English even before the students have
completed the placement exam so all students are registered in these
courses.
– Subsequent placement test scores result in numerous schedule changes
which students complain about because they have often ordered the books
for the other courses.
16. The posted placement test deadline is not adhered to.
– This often results in the need to reschedule courses already in progress.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies: Observations
17. Placement scores are not stored in student record in PeopleSoft only a
completed indicator is used.
– This practice prevents placement scores from being automatically used in
registration process to determine eligibility for courses.
– Staff review scores manually.
18. Course pre-requisites not entirely built in PeopleSoft.
– This results in students being registered in courses they do not meet the
prerequisite.
– In addition, the system is not recognizing the transfer course work which
meets the pre-requisite and thus does not allow a student to be registered for
a course without an override.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
1.
Review all manual processes for the following and take action as
necessary to reduce the number of manual processes:
– Necessity (e.g., is the college required to keep paper documents?).
– Ability to fix “broken” functionality.
– Ways to automate the process, for example.
• The development of query scripts.
• The development of scripts to automate operational processes.
– Duplication of effort (e.g., maintaining a separate spreadsheet for transfer
credits, manually tracking degree progress)
– Reasonableness of the timelines in applicable SLAs.
– Applicability of student self-service to the process.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
2.
If unit staff are expected to continue to assist financial aid staff in calling
students, temporarily adjust SLAs to accommodate the shift in duties for
the time that unit staff are assisting financial aid in their processes.
– Communicate these temporary adjustments to other units.
3.
Determine if paper files are required by accrediting agency and establish
a complete records retention policy.
– If so, make it a priority to secure all paperwork with personally identifiable
information in a compliant manner.
– If not, make it a priority to securely destroy all paper already imaged and jump
start the archiving processes with extra help. Confirm procedures for
electronic files and data backup.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
4.
Simultaneously while reviewing and adjusting the manual processes for
staff, review the daily processes of the registrar and assistant registrar to
determine the following:
–
Necessity (e.g., Are 500 emails a day required for operations?)
– The appropriateness of delegating some processes to other staff members
who will have more time if the recommendations are adopted.
5.
Provide support for professional development so that the assistant
registrar and registrar have both the time and skill necessary to serve as
leaders in the unit.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
6.
Establish and maintain a regular communication process for the unit
leadership to share changes in procedures in a timely manner with the
entire unit.
7.
Develop several key exception reports and grant access to run or view
these reports to staff members who need the data for operational
purposes. Some examples include:
– Schedule changes – date as key parameter
– Admissions checklist missing items – term as key parameter
– Grant access to the run the missing student registration report
– Until the mid-term student is differentiated sufficiently from the regular term
student, create an exception report for “Ws” assigned to mid-term students.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
8.
After confirming the accuracy of courses required for degree programs in
PeopleSoft, adopt technology to use current enrollment data to develop
course scheduling projections.
– This enhancement is particularly important because of the short terms and
time between terms available to correct student schedules for failed or
repeated courses or change in full-time or part-time status.
9.
Either adopt the faculty load functionality in PeopleSoft or fix the data
sharing process between the PeopleSoft and the faculty database.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
10. Review appropriateness of practice of registering students before
placement exams are taken.
– This practice will have negative consequences if student self-registration is
enabled.
11. Record placement exams scores on student records in PeopleSoft.
12. Build cut scores into course pre-requisites and enable course prerequisite checks in PeopleSoft.
– This will be necessary for accurate student self-registration.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
13. Build generic test codes that can be used to recognize course
equivalencies in the registration process from transfer courses that meet
a pre-requisite requirement.
14. Establish a disaster recovery plan to cover all forms of data.
15. Establish a procedure for regularly reviewing SLA’s and involve all
affected units in the process.
16. Establish and distribute student email use policy.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Processes, procedure, and policies:
Recommendations
17. Develop and share detailed records retention and destruction plan once
the determination has been made as to whether or not paper files are
required.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Organizational Structure: Observations
1.
From the organizational chart and job descriptions it is unclear what the
reporting structure is for the unit.
2.
This lack of clarity in reporting lines is also evident when talking with staff.
– There is confusion among staff about who is supposed to lead and direct their
work.
– In some examples the leadership structure appears to be a moving target
depending on if a manager needs something done or not.
– This causes confusion among staff in regards to task prioritization.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Organizational Structure: Observations
3.
There does not appear to be a real strong leadership/organizational link
between the assistant director and the rest of the unit.
4.
From the interviews with staff there is not a clear link between the
assistant director’s leadership role and this position’s role within the rest
of the organization.
– This contributes to the apparent lack of a “voice” for the unit.
5.
Both the registrar’s and assistant registrar’s job duties are heavily
focused on daily processing rather than on management and operations.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Organizational Structure: Observations
6.
The CDCC processes documents for the entire organization yet reports
through the registration and records unit.
– Staff from the unit actually commented how some of the offices they serve are
open seven days a week and CDCC is not because the schedule reflects that
of the registration and records.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Organizational Structure: Recommendations
1.
Revise organizational chart to reflect reporting lines and share this with
the unit staff and organizationally.
2.
Have the leadership work with staff to clarify reporting structure and when
exceptions to that structure are necessary and appropriate.
3.
If the current organizational structure is maintained, clarify, strengthen
and foster the leadership role of the assistant director.
– This may involve professional development training in leadership and/or a
formal mentor relationship with an administrator.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Organizational Structure: Recommendations
4.
Determine the appropriate role for the assistant director relative to the
rest of the organization.
– Communicate and foster this role with the organization.
– Document the role in the job description
5.
Review other similar organizations and AACRAO resources for duties
regularly assigned to the registrar and assistant registrar.
– Determine the appropriateness of these roles to the requirements of the
organization and rewrite both job descriptions to reflect operations and
management rather than daily processes.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Organizational Structure: Recommendations
6.
Review the role of CDCC relative to the organization as a whole and
determine if the unit should have a different place in the organizational
map.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Staffing levels, responsibilities, and cross-training of
duties: Observations
1.
The current staffing levels for registration and records supports the focus
on manual processes with the exception of staffing within CDCC which is
probably short staffed for what is expected of the unit.
2.
If processes are automated and as appropriate shifted back to student
services there will most likely be an excess number of positions within the
unit.
– The exception being with CDCC which will have an increased work load as
additional processes are shifted to electronic documents and the records
archiving process moves forward.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Staffing levels, responsibilities, and cross-training of
duties: Observations
3.
Current responsibilities for the unit are far broader than generally within
the scope of a registration and records office.
4.
The unit lacks sufficient cross training to provide for efficient continuity of
services should there be staff attrition or long term absences.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Staffing levels, responsibilities, and cross-training of
duties: Recommendations
1.
If the recommendations for automation and reassignment of advising and
admissions duties are adopted, the whole structure of the unit will need to
be reevaluated for the remaining workload.
– Particular attention should be given to the roles and staffing levels of the
records advisors, records specialists and CDCC.
2.
Once changes are implemented, review and refine the mission of the unit.
3.
Document clearly any unique processes and provide cross-training.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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The Use of Technology: Observations
In addition to the observations included in other sections of this report there
are the following relative to the use of technology.
1.
The newly revised training documents for records advisors and records
specialists are comprehensive but need some refinement.
2.
The imaging solution appears to have been successfully implemented for
the E-SARs process.
3.
Overall the PeopleSoft product seems to have been implemented with
only the barest of essentials for registration and records.
−
Anecdotally there appears to be little prioritization from IT for enhancements or fixing
existing problems for registration and records.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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The Use of Technology: Observations
4.
Staff seem to accept broken processes within the database to be
standard operating procedure.
5.
Including management, there do not appear to be any “power users”
within the unit.
– A “power user” is one who understand the system functionality beyond rote
processing and is able to use this understanding to help IT troubleshoot
issues and help plan for future enhancements.
6.
For the most part staff learn processes through on the job training with
real data in the production environment.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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The Use of Technology: Observations
7.
Other units apparently have advanced training resources built into a
product called UPK which allows for demonstrations and the testing of
skill sets.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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The Use of Technology: Recommendations
1.
To increase usability add the following to the existing training manuals for
PeopleSoft.
– Table of contents.
– Process workflows.
2.
Consider developing an internal wiki page to store these and other
training manuals allowing greater ease of access to the materials and
simplifying the document updating process.
3.
Develop “power users” for each of the respective areas.
– Have these users play a key role in upgrades, the selection of future
enhancements and in trouble shooting the system.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Focus Area 4: Recommendations
4.
Cease training in the production environment.
– Conduct the training in a cloned environment.
5.
If resources permit, adopt the UPK technology for training within the unit.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Transfer Credit Processes: Observations
1.
The transfer evaluators report being essentially separate from the rest of
the unit both in terms of responsibilities and in any applicable information
from team meetings.
2.
They report not having any real training for their responsibilities.
3.
They really liked the transcript evaluation system (a single online source
for course catalogs) but no longer have access.
– This means that they need to go to each transfer college separately to try and
find catalog information.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Transfer Credit Processes: Observations
4.
There is no clear distinction when it is appropriate for the program
directors to review the general education transfer equivalency decisions
made by the transcript evaluators.
5.
Program directors make all core transcript equivalency decisions.
6.
Transcript equivalencies from the largest feeder schools are not built into
the database.
− This requires a reevaluation of the commonly transferred courses each time it
is submitted on a student transcript.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Transfer Credit Processes: Observations
7.
It was reported that between 40-80% of evaluations are conducted on
unofficial transcripts which are then stored on paper.
– Subsequently received official transcripts are then re-evaluated.
8.
The current transcript credit practice often conflicts with the current
registration process because the credits are evaluated after a student is
already registered resulting in either duplicated coursework or the need to
change a student’s schedule.
9.
Transfer credit evaluation is being stored on a separate spreadsheet
outside of PeopleSoft.
– Other staff who need access to the transfer data to not know how to access it
in PeopleSoft.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Transfer Credit Processes: Observations
10. The process for communicating graduation information with students is a
manual process and requires an email for each potential graduate.
11. The proficiency exam process is complicated and is processed a couple
of times a term.
– Steps include putting the student manually into e-college, pulling the grades,
and removing the student from e-college once the exam is completed.
– If the student is not removed from e-college the content of the proficiency
exam is always visible to the student.
12. Students are already requesting proficiency exams for the newly revised
curriculum but many are not yet available.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Transfer Credit Processes: Recommendations
1.
Seek ways to engage transcript evaluators in the overall unit operations
and establish refresher training.
2.
Adopt the transfer evaluation system or equivalent solution on a
permanent basis.
3.
Clarify and document transfer credit processes including common
exceptions.
4.
Build the articulation tables for the largest feeder colleges into
PeopleSoft.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Transfer Credit Processes: Recommendations
5.
Revisit value of practice of evaluating unofficial transcripts.
– If the practice needs to continue, store the evaluations in a secure manner.
6.
Determine if there is a way to indicate in a student record that they have
transfer credit and use that indicator to suspend the registration process
until transcripts have been evaluated.
7.
Build a report that will enable the transcript evaluators to know which
transcripts to work on first according to the student’s intended term of
enrollment.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Transfer Credit Processes: Recommendations
8.
Cross-train records advisors to know where to look for pending and
completed transfer credit.
9.
Eliminate practice of maintaining a separate transcript evaluation
spreadsheet.
10. Build a query that will extract student email addresses for those students
who need to be contacted regarding graduation.
11. Review proficiency exam process for simplification options.
12. Dedicate some time to finalizing the current proficiency exams.
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Additional Observations:
1.
Updated IPEDS race and ethnicity categories do not yet appear to be on
the admissions application
– Voluntary for 2009-2010
– Mandatory for 2010-2011 for fall enrollment
– Mandatory for 2011 – for all components
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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Thank you for the opportunity!
Wendy Kilgore, Ph.D.
Senior AACRAO Consultant
WendyKilgore@comcast.net
http://consulting.aacrao.org/
Westwood College Registrar’s Office Audit September 23-24, 2009
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