Transformation of Freshmen Registration and Section Planning

Bharathwaj Vijayakumar, Associate Director of Data Analytics, Rowan University
Samyukta Alapati, Senior Data Analyst, Rowan University

To keep students on-track to graduate, Rowan University places incoming freshmen into the appropriate section of the required courses for their major. However, manually evaluating and registering students became more and more time consuming as Rowan's student population grew. Rowan's Data Analytics team worked in collaboration with the University Advising, Testing Services, and Development & Innovation teams to create an automated system to quickly and accurately evaluate and place all 2,700 incoming freshmen. The solution, known as the FIGS process, saved the university more than 200 hours of staff time. The entire process of assigning students to placement exams and course sections now happens automatically, and the Registrar Office receives a clean, organized dashboard to work from when registering students. The next stage in the process will take it one step further and automatically register students in Banner. This will save approximately 300 additional hours of staff time.

Learning Objectives

• How to extract information on a day-to-day manual process from the minds of the users and convert them into an automated process?
• How can the freshmen registration process be automated from start to end? 
• And what are the different tools that can be used for that How various departments across the university can work together and build a solution that can improve the student experience?