Committee Review Redundancies

Lindley Davis

Hi Everyone,

Curious how larger school structure their reviews.

At Appstate, we review by committee and have been assigning all opportunities within a department (ie accounting) to the respective review committee. The problem we are running into is that students who qualify for multiple scholarships are having to be reviewed 10-15 times. We can't review on a General / Conditional level because we need the committees to make decisions based on the opportunities students are actually eligible for. They don't have an Opportunity Admin in the department running the show behind the scenes. (In the past when we've tried the General/Conditional level, they award students for scholarships they aren't eligible to receive….)

I'd love to hear how other people have solved this problem!

We've put in an enhancement request for a feature that would allow application reviews within a given reviewer group to copy across opportunities (similar to the PA autofill function), but development can't make any promises. If you're in a similar boat, the enhancement ID is AWARDS-I-408 - feel free to add your vote and maybe we can get some traction.

Kirstie Thompson

@Lindley Davis
Hi, did you ever find a solution to this? We stopped reviewing all general applications of all applicants because of high volume, and not every student qualified for an award. But I don't want to review a student 10-15 times like you said, either. Curious if you found a solution to this. Thanks!

Lindley Davis

@Kirstie Thompson

I wish I had something to offer but unfortunately we've not made any headway on this. It's been further complicated by the fact that several colleges have elected to review anonymously and there is no way to make select conditional applications anonymous and review on that level vs opportunity level. The all-or-nothing functionality of system features has proven to be complicated for us and is our biggest hurdle when it comes to creating campus buy-in.

There are some enhancement requests out there that relate to this issue if you would like to add your voice to the comments!

Klysicia Young

@Lindley Davis - Hey Lindley!

We're trying something this year in a few of our units. We're doing a 2 layer process where the reviewers evaluate at the application level first and score students holistically. We narrow down qualifications to submitted applicants only and any additional layers they may want. We give them 1-2 weeks, depending on their assignments, and then they review again at the opportunity level. We duplicate the group and then manually assign applicants at the opp level based on conditional app scores ≥ 70.

Thus far, they've gone ok. FAFSA delay is making this harder for us in general this year.

Lindley Davis

We tried reviewing on a conditional level this year, in part due to the number of complaints from faculty about the redundant reviews and also because of the FAFSA situation. (We needed all students to be read, regardless of need level since we've only just started receiving data.)

The conditional level reviews did not go over well. Faculty liked having fewer assignments, but not being able to see which scholarships students matched with was a big problem. I wish BBAM would address system issues like this. I know they have a lot of competing priorities, but we're getting pressure from all sides to discontinue the system because we can't adapt it to fit our needs.

In an ideal world, rubrics would work like the Post Acceptance questions - we could check a box to make specific rubric scores copy over from one scholarship to all others assigned within the same review group. Maybe if we get enough votes in the enhancement request, it will eventually gain traction and be implemented. Let me know if your institution finds a work-around!

Lindley Davis

@Klysicia Young

Interesting! I don't think we could persuade our faculty to participate in a 2-stage process. I do like the premise though and may keep this in mind for the future. Thank you!

Klysicia Young

@Lindley Davis Of course! I'll share feedback when I have them after they're done. I agree convincing was the hard part. I started with 2 units that have large populations to get their buy-in first. We host an End of Year meeting, and that's when our “test units” share how a new methods did or did not work for them with the other colleges/units.