On December 6, 2019, Lehman College was awarded the Collaboration Award for the digital transformation success of its Transfer Credit Process, titled Electronic Transfer Credit Evaluation (eTCE). Using ProcessMaker, the college has taken its formerly manual entry process and digitized and automated it to increase efficiency, agility, and productivity across its campus.
A broken Transfer Credit Process
Lehman College is the City University of New York's only four-year college in the Bronx. Lehman was facing a challenge felt by universities not just native to the CUNY system, but to higher education institutions all over the nation. Over 68 percent of Lehman’s students are transfer students, placing great pressure to innovate. Up until recently, transfer evaluations were part of a multi-step process riddled with time constraints, physical back-and-forth, and poor student experience. “We were sending students new to our campus all over. We would send them a map, we gave them a directory, the form, and then we said, ‘Okay, now go find them.’ Even when they did find faculty, sometimes those members weren’t around due to scheduling matters or common advising days on campus [known as CDAD],” shared Christie Lucchese, Transfer Evaluation Coordinator from Lehman College. On the student side, the process to transfer credits was daunting. The form to complete was upwards of four pages long, involving manual entry on behalf of students who then had to give this information, physically, over to staff. From this point, staff would then input the recorded information into a system by hand, which took several days (if not weeks) and was prone to human errors. Sometimes if a form was handed in incomplete, the university would place a hold on the student registering for classes, limiting the student from taking the credits needed to continue their degree or even graduate. Due to a lack of electronic databases available, there was no way to track these forms, how many courses were pending, and how many signatures were needed to complete the process. Both parties experienced great frustration in between the peak enrollment times between January and August, with students often waiting in long lines to see the Registrar and the staff unable to process all of the requests in a timely manner. Most of the time, students were not notified about the approval or rejection of their credits until September, further damaging the student experience on campus. Quickly realizing this process was no longer sustainable nor productive for staff and students alike, Lehman College sought to digitize into a using ProcessMaker.
