Opportunity Level Administrator Questions

Lindsay Graham

Hi all,

We have a new flexible scholarship that requires students complete an honors course with a “B” or higher. We currently don't import individual class grades, only the overall GPA. I have never used Administrator questions and can't seem to find much in the Knowledgebase on when/why/how they would be used.

If an Admin question is added, would the Admin answer it for each applicant? I was thinking I could make two Admin questions that would ask for the class grade to be entered and an unofficial transcript to be uploaded. That way, the reviewers could see all the information in the system without having to look it up outside the system.

Any advice or feedback is appreciated!

Lindsay

Jonathan Blevins

Hello, Lindsay!

I have yet to find a situation in which I would use the admin questions (which have to manually be answered) over just importing the data. Since you can't answer admin questions en masse via an import, I don't use them. Now depending on the eligible population (5 vs 500), it may not be as big of an issue.

Knowledgebase Article

From what I can tell, they are mostly for double checking eligibility and if applicants meet specific, un-importable, qualifications.

My thought would be, depending on your imports and home-of-record system, your IT team may be able to create an import that would verify if the an honors course equivalent has been inserted into the students official record and then just import a Y/N/Blank response into BBAM. OR, you could just do a manual import once the application due date has passed (but make sure to import the data 24 hours before the internal deadline passes and notify BBAM Support).

I hope that helps!
Jonathan.

EDIT: And yes, if you use admin questions, you have to answer each question for each student which means you have to manually answer the question and upload each record if you go down that route. Sounds like a potential nightmare. But depending on how accessible you want the information to be for reviewers, it may be necessary.

Lindsay Graham

@Jonathan Blevins Hi, Jonathan! Thank you so much for your response. Right now the population is very small (5-10), but the goal is to grow the program and also increase the amount of funds available to award.

My original thought was that while the program was small I would hold off on asking IT to make changes to the file. I was picturing them having to add each course description. Hearing your suggestion of a Y/N field that would verify if an honors course equivalent is present for a specific term seems like a much more efficient way to get that information!

Thanks again,

Lindsay

Ann Schubert

@Lindsay Graham Hi Lindsay, we have two administrative questions and one of them is to upload the applicant's degree audit for exactly the reason you stated. Our IT department has yet to give us a solution to automatically upload a transcript so we load them into the administrative question manually. We did it this year for over 2000 applications. It was a huge undertaking, but not all of our reviewers have access to student grades so it worked great to have it accessible right in the system. Last year we only used it for the student's that did not submit their own transcript, but we had to field too many questions from students on how to access their transcript and create a pdf so we decided to just load it for all eligible applications this year.

Joel Spiess

@Ann Schubert We have some conditional applications that require students to upload an unofficial transcript. One of our scholarship administrators created a two min video guide that walks the student through how to access, download, and upload their transcript to the question in the conditional application. It works well and saves us on staff time.