Scholarships are in, now what
I'm looking for best practices or procedure list of how to process scholarships through SLM before sending apps to evaluators/selection committees. Do you review them and abandon ones that clearly don't qualify, etc. and then mark the app complete, etc? Would appreciate your insights or any shared docs of procedures. Thanks!
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We do not use the UA so I don't how applicable our process would be if you use UA. During the first screening, we abandon incomplete/draft applications. I run reports for our different scholarships so it's easier to look through the applications for ones that don't meet the hard criteria of a specific scholarship (GPA, type of school attending, major, played sport, etc.). Applications that don't meet the hard criteria I'll draft deny at this point. I use the reports function a lot when we are screening and evaluating applications. I'll then review any remaining ones in the submitted bucket and mark them complete if all the information is there. Early in the application period, it's easier to review and mark complete as they come in but the flurry of applications the last two days is hard to keep up with. It's more efficient for me to run reports first and deny any that don't meet the criteria. I also draft deny as they are submitted if they clearly don't meet hard criteria (ie wrong major). Hope that helps a little.
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Thank you! We have UA and stand alone processes. So you create your reports based on the eligibility criteria and then run it against each year's applicants so you're not reinventing the wheel each year - correct? Thank you for sharing - we're trying to make SLM work harder for us.
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Yes, generally that is the case. There are some minor updates to the reports each year but it's generally not reinventing the wheel.
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We do not use the UA. Using the eligibility quiz keeps applicants away from any scholarships they do not qualify for. We do not consider any applications in draft, only ones that were submitted. Any required items were required questions, but I suppose it could happen that an incorrect document was uploaded. I think there may have been one time in three years we encountered an incorrect document. We had not checked the documents (too many), they "came out in the wash", meaning a reviewer reported it to us.
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We have added required admin only questions within the application for us to validate eligibility. We have to check Yes before we can mark it complete so we don't mistakenly let anything through that hasn't been verified. (We list all of the required elements in the prompt as we have 72 scholarships and all are different eligibility.) This is our second year of doing this and it has dramatically improved our screening process before assigning for review.
If the app doesn't qualify, we notify the applicant and then mark it denied.
I only mark abandoned for drafts that aren't submitted by the deadline.
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Would you mind sharing a copy of your full application with the admin questions in it? j.willis@dekalbccf.org
I'm going to rebuild our UA and put all of our scholarships in it and no stand alone processes (the goal), so I would appreciate seeing the structure of others' apps. We have about 90 scholarships so I feel your pain! ;)
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@JoleneWillis @CarolSloper I would love to also see how you use the admin questions with a UA. We have not used a UA as our scholarships have different questions. I'd love to see if you have any SLM processes or procedures as well - hjohnson@northtexascf.org
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Admin or internal questions (depending on if you want your evaluators to see the answers to the questions) are a great option for tracking inside an application. I've seen folks use checkbox questions, table questions and even a series of drop-down/radio button yes/no questions to accomplish this.
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We use the Universal Application. Last year I added Admin questions to the application and when reviewing each application I would verify information such as the GPA matching the transcript, the AGI matching the tax return, the selected grade level is correct based on the transcript, was the GPA converted correctly to a 4.0 scale. This was the best way because I could immediately make edits and comments to the application as needed, as well as email the applicant at the bottom of the page. This year we tried using Evaluation 1 as the staff review with the same questions, so once an app is submitted it was assigned to a staff person for review, and then those same questions are asked. This does not work as well because you cannot make edits or comments on the app when it is in the Eval stage.
If a recipient is not eligible, we deny the request and leave a comment as to why (this is pretty rare though since the UA filters work well). Sometimes based on changes I made (such as GPA) I have to retest the eligibility and it changes the scholarships they qualify for. When I run this and see what they should never have qualified for, I delete those requests.
Once the staff review is done, we then assign the applications for external review. I group the applications based on student name, and assign each student to a pair of reviewers so that every app is reviewed by at least 2 people and their scores are averaged. This is a manual and somewhat labor intensive process, but there is no other way to do it yet. We get around 150-200 apps per year and use 25-30 reviewers. Some of our scholarships use special review committees so I assign those first to get them out of the way, and then assign the rest to our regular group of reviewers.
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