Understanding Alternate Program Offers

When applicants do not meet the requirements for their requested program, you can evaluate them in alternate programs, thereby giving them a second chance to attend your organization. For example, an applicant might be denied entry to your highly competitive engineering program, but when re-evaluated for a less competitive program the same applicant might be accepted.

To create alternate program offers you must first assign an alternate academic program and an alternate evaluation code. You select the primary academic program to which the person is applying (such as FAU), and then specify the alternate program (such as LAU). Thus, all applicants who get denied or waitlisted for FAU, in this example, get evaluated in the LAU program.

After you have assigned alternate program evaluation codes, you run the Assign Alternate Eval Codes process (ADALTEVL.sqr) that assigns alternate evaluation codes to applicants. You will select applicants based on academic institution, the academic program that they requested, and the admit term. For example, if you select the program LAU and admit term 0450, the process will assign an alternate evaluation code to applicants who applied to but were denied or waitlisted to LAU in Fall 2001.

After you have assigned alternate evaluation codes to applicants, you must either run the materials extract process, or assign the materials manually. Then you must run the Evaluation Calculation process to evaluate them in the new program using the new evaluation code that you just assigned to them.

After the Evaluation Calculation process calculates the overall rating score, you run the Alternate Programs process (ADALTPRG.sqr). The Alternate Programs process compares the minimum rating score that you define to the overall rating score that the Evaluation Calculation process calculates. If the applicant meets the criteria, the Alternate Programs process inserts a new row in the person's application (adm_appl_prog) for the existing application number and assigns a new program number. Thus, you still have access to the application in which the person was denied or waitlisted.