Understanding the Evaluating Applicants Business Process
This section lists prerequisites and discusses the evaluating applicants business process.
Before you begin evaluating applicants, applications must be fully entered into your system. Depending on your office procedures, you will add evaluations at different times during the year. Although not all of the following information is required to run evaluations, the following list can serve as an overview of the relevant data that can be entered, and thus considered, for an application:
Applicant demographics.
Applicant address.
Application program data.
Application data.
Application recruiting data.
External education data.
Test results.
General materials.
Application materials.
Early financial aid offer information.
There are many ways you can use your system to evaluate applicants. Recruiting and Admissions provides SQR processes that enable you to automate much of your business process. You can also use Recruiting and Admissions to evaluate applicants manually. In fact, many combinations of manual and automated processes can work. Therefore, before evaluating applicants, decide how you want to use your system to evaluate applicants.
Regardless of whether you choose to evaluate applicants manually, through SQR processes, or through a combination of manual and automated processing, you must define rating schemes and the rating components that make up rating schemes. You must also define:
Evaluation codes.
Evaluation committees (if applicable to your evaluation business process).
Evaluation status codes.
After you have set up the process for evaluating applicants, you are ready to perform the evaluations. This is where you have the most options regarding manual processing versus automatic processing. Performing applicant evaluations involves:
Assigning evaluation codes to applicants.
Linking materials (such as recommendations, essays, and portfolios) to applications.
Assigning committees (which consist of the evaluators who physically evaluate the applicants).
Entering evaluator ratings.
Retrieving and evaluating objective ratings (such as test scores and GPA) from the applications.
After you have defined rating schemes, evaluation codes, committees, and evaluation statuses, you are ready to evaluate the applicants. Depending on the evaluation code/rating scheme structure that your institution uses, there are many ways to evaluate applicants. This book limits the discussion to the tools that you can use to fulfill your specific needs. These tools include:
General evaluations and general evaluator ratings.
Application evaluations and application evaluation ratings.
An automated method for assigning evaluation components.
An SQR process for linking application materials to applications.
An SQR process for entering rating values.
An SQR process for evaluating applicants based on rating values, and for updating application evaluation statuses.
A COBOL process for calculating enrollment deposits.
A COBOL process for activating applicants as students.
Use these tools to assign evaluation codes to applications, to enter and retrieve rating component values, to enter or have the system calculate overall rating values, to evaluate the applicant based on those overall rating values, and to update the applicant's program status.
Automatic Versus Manual Processing
The following table presents the steps that can be performed manually or automatically:
|
Task |
To execute automatically |
To execute manually |
|---|---|---|
|
Assign evaluation codes. |
Evaluation Code Assignment process ADEVALCD.SQR |
General Evaluations component or Application Evaluations component. |
|
Link application materials. |
Application Materials Extract process ADMTEXT.SQR |
Application Materials page. |
|
Enter rating values for rating schemes and rating components. |
For objective rating components: Evaluation Calculation process ADMTLRTG.SQR |
For subjective rating components: General Evaluator Ratings component or Application Evaluator Ratings component. |
|
Evaluate applicants based on rating values, and update application evaluation statuses. |
Application Status Update ADMTLPGS.SQR |
General Evaluations component or Application Evaluations component. |
|
Calculate enrollment deposits. |
When you update application evaluation statuses in batch: SFPBADEP (COBOL SQL) |
Calculate Deposit Fees link on the Application Program Data page. |
|
Activate applicants as students. |
When you update application evaluation statuses in batch: ADPCPPRC (COBOL SQL) |
Application Program Data page in the Application Maintenance component. |
Your institution can rename the processes listed in the above table. You can also add to or edit the SQCs for the SQRs listed above. Check with your system administrator for more information about the specific SQRs and SQCs used by your institution.
General Versus Application Evaluations
To assign evaluation codes manually, you must create an evaluation for each applicant. There are two sets of components that you can use to create evaluations for an applicant.
Use the General Evaluations and General Evaluator Ratings components to create general evaluations.
General evaluations are not tied to a career, program, or application number. Therefore, use general evaluations to evaluate applicants on general criteria that are not required by a particular career or program (such as a statement of purpose that the institution requires, regardless of the career or program the person is applying to). In addition, because general evaluations are not tied to application numbers, you can use general evaluations to evaluate individuals (such as prospects) without having to enter an application.
Use the Application Evaluations and Application Evaluator Ratings components to create application evaluations.
Application evaluations are tied to a career, program, and application number. Therefore, use application evaluations to evaluate applicants on specific criteria for the career and program to which they are applying.
You can evaluate an applicant using both of these sets of components if you desire. You also use these components to enter ratings. You can enter the ratings manually, or you can use the Application Evaluation process to retrieve and evaluate objective scores, and then enter rating values. If you enter ratings manually, you use the Application Evaluator Ratings or the General Evaluator Ratings page. If the Application Evaluation process retrieves the ratings, they appear on the Overall Ratings page in the Application Evaluation component.
Understanding Automatic Overall Rating Calculation
Your Recruiting and Admissions application is equipped with a background process that averages evaluator ratings and overall ratings. Therefore, you only have to manually enter rating values at the rating component level. The system averages those ratings and populates overall ratings at the next higher level. The system continues to average overall ratings until you have an overall rating for the application.
Image: Illustrating the hierarchical structure
This chart illustrates the hierarchical structure of the background process that averages evaluator ratings and overall ratings.
You must first enter rating component rating values. The system then calculates the overall rating value for the scheme. After all of the overall rating values for the scheme have been calculated, the system calculates the overall rating value for the evaluator, and the process continues hierarchically.
For example, suppose you assigned two committees to evaluate an applicant. One committee is to evaluate essays and interviews, and the second committee is to evaluate other materials (for simplicity we will not look at the details of the second committee). The first committee consists of two committee members (or evaluators). Each evaluator evaluates two schemes: the undergraduate essay and the undergraduate interview. The evaluators evaluate the style and grammar components of the undergraduate essay scheme, and they evaluate the delivery and preparation components of the undergraduate interview scheme.
First, the evaluator enters ratings for each component in each scheme.
In the example in the diagram above, the first evaluator entered 10 for style and 8 for grammar for the essay, and 6 for delivery and 8 for preparation for the interview. The second evaluator entered 4 for style and 6 for grammar for the essay, and 6 for delivery and 8 for preparation for the interview. For the system to calculate the averages, you must enter values at this level first.
When the evaluators saved the pages, the system calculates the averages for each scheme and populates the Overall Rating fields on the General Evaluator Rating page or the Application Evaluator Rating page, depending on the type of evaluation.
In our example, the overall rating for the first scheme for Evaluator1 is 9 (the average of 10 and 8), and the overall rating for the second scheme for Evaluator1 is 7 (the average of 6 and 8). The overall rating for the first scheme for Evaluator2 is 5 (the average of 4 and 6), and the overall rating for the second scheme for Evaluator2 is 7 (the average of 6 and 8).
After each scheme has an overall rating value, the system populates the overall rating for the evaluator (after you save the page) and populates the Overall Rating field on the Evaluator Ratings page in the General Evaluation or Application Evaluation components, depending on the type of evaluation.
In our example, the overall rating for Evaluator1 is 8 (the average of 9 and 7), and the overall rating for Evaluator2 is 6 (the average of 5 and 7).
After each evaluator has an overall rating value, the system populates the overall rating for the committee (after you save the page) and populates the Overall Rating field on the Evaluation Committee page in the General Evaluation or Application Evaluation components, depending on the type of evaluation.
In our example, the overall rating for Committee1 is 7 (the average of 8 and 6), and suppose that the overall rating for Committee2 is 9.
After each committee has an overall rating value, the system populates the overall rating for the application (after you save the page) and populates the Overall Rating field on the General Evaluation or Application Evaluation page, depending on the type of evaluation.
In our example, the overall rating for the application is 8 (the average of 7 and 9).
Remember that you must start at the first step. If you manually enter overall ratings for a scheme, for instance, without entering components, you will break the chain and the system will not calculate averages at any level. In other words, the system only calculates overall ratings at any given level if it had calculated the overall ratings at every level below that one.