How we revolutionized student scholarships

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    The New Year is just around the corner, which means meetings of commissions for the appointment of increased academic scholarships. For many universities, this is a large amount of routine work, various tense moments associated with bias in the appointment of scholarships, and, of course, a lot of work on the delivery of documents for the students themselves.

    In this article, we will share our revolutionary experience and talk about how to completely automate the process of appointing increased scholarships, avoid the negative consequences mentioned above, get feedback from students and recognize that everything was fair.


    Analysis of the situation


    In many universities, to assign an increased scholarship, a student needs to do a lot of work to collect various documents, certificates, diplomas, diplomas, etc.
    Moreover, without collecting all these documents together, the student cannot say with certainty whether he can apply for a scholarship or not. Many potential scholarship holders do not receive scholarships just because they are stopped by a bureaucratic process.
    Using the example of one of the universities, we calculated that one student brings about 30 documents to the scholarship commission. Thus, if 1000 people submit documents, the scholarship commission will have to process more than 30 thousand documents. It's a lot. There is a risk of error and the potential danger of using filters by the commission itself for its own unloading. In addition, the quality of verification of the documents themselves provided by students is also reduced.

    So cons:
    • A lot of paper work for the scholarship commission
    • A completely non-transparent mechanism from the student's point of view
    • Bureaucratic delays scare students away
    • As a consequence of the previous paragraph, low competition among applicants
    • Error Risks
    • No feedback


    Solution


    As a foundation for solving the problem of selection for the appointment of increased scholarships, we decided to use the Federal rating system “ LevelPride ”. This system allows participants to save their achievements, maintain a portfolio and generate ratings based on the achievements made.

    Step 1.


    Within six months or before the announcement of the competition, the student electronically uploads all his achievements (certificates, scientific publications, participation in the conference, etc.) into the system. An important point! Having downloaded his achievements once, when submitting documents for participation in subsequent competitions, the student should only add new documents.
    Already at this step there are a number of advantages :
    1. Student eliminates the need to collect all the papers manually
    2. No need to reassemble them
    3. Even before the announcement of the competition for increased scholarships, a student can evaluate the number of points he has, compare them with those points that are necessary to obtain an increased scholarship and evaluate his strength.

    Step 2


    The student joins a group of applicants for increased scholarships.
    A rating is automatically created, and the student can evaluate their strengths, if necessary, "get" the desired number of achievements.

    More pros
    Transparency. The participant’s portfolio is open, and all participants who join the group of applicants can see the achievements of other users. This plus immediately cuts off the question of bias.

    Step 3


    The moderator electronically evaluates the TOP rating in the number of places allocated for the scholarship.
    The system builds a preliminary rating, but it's not scary. The moderator through the system will quickly check all the achievements. And he will ask the first 50, if 50 places are allocated, the original documents. Further, these documents will be processed manually, which eliminates the possibility of fraud and loading into the system of fake results. If there are still fake achievements among the top, the moderator will simply contact participant 51 and ask him to provide documents.

    A plus
    If a thousand students provide all the necessary documents, it will turn out about 30 thousand documents for processing, instead of this figure it will be necessary to process only 1.5 thousand, or even less. Since the reliability of some documents can be evaluated in the electronic version.

    The main problem that we were afraid of when developing a system for assigning increased scholarships was the possibility that the system would be filled with unreliable achievements. In practice, there were very few such cases, while the students themselves helped to find them, who in the competition tracked all the achievements of competitors and pessimized them even before the moderator processed them.

    Accessible to all


    Indeed, the decision about which was told is available to everyone. It is free and absolutely free. All the functionality that was described is available to all users of the LevelPride system. And by the way, this solution is not necessary to use for students. By the same principle, it is possible to select applicants in organizations, for example, to pay bonus.

    PS A short video about the implementation experience in one of the universities
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4HHijeXbBo

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