How ApplyBoard Screens Every Student Application for Quality and Completion

With the popularity of international education at an all-time high, many university and college admissions teams are often buried under an avalanche of student applications. The difficulty of sorting through and properly evaluating all of these applications is a genuine concern, both for admissions staff and for the students awaiting their decisions.

Thankfully, technological innovation can replace a lot of that challenging work, ensuring that every application received by an institution meets at least a certain acceptable level of quality and completeness. To that end, ApplyBoard’s automated application pre-screening process ensures only the strongest applications are submitted to an institution. Here’s how.

Strengthening the Sector

As part of our Strengthening the Sector series, we’re exploring the many ways that ApplyBoard pushes the international education sector forward.

This time, our focus is on application pre-screening, and how ApplyBoard’s unique technology can help alleviate pressure on admissions staff by passing along only fully complete applications with a high likelihood of success.

Read the other articles in this series as they’re published:

• Recruitment Partner Vetting
• Ongoing Performance Monitoring
• Sector Training
• Document Authentication
• Study Permit Approval Advantage

ApplyBoard’s Pre-Screening Process

ApplyBoard pre-screens all applications internally before submitting them to institutions to ensure they meet program requirements. Our sophisticated pre-screening process is powered by AI technology and supported by our efficient Customer Experience (CX) team.

Here’s how our multi-step process works.

Application Submission

Students don’t need an account to search the ApplyBoard Platform for institutions and programs. However, they must create an account, and fill out their student profile, in order to create an application.

Once a student’s profile is populated, the platform automatically checks their program eligibility based on a number of factors, including their previous level and program of study, English proficiency, and GPA. The platform will then restrict the student’s search results to programs for which they qualify.

After a student selects a program, they receive an alert informing them that while they meet the basic criteria for the program, they are encouraged to follow a series of steps to make sure their application is as competitive as possible.

ApplyBoard has a dedicated CX Knowledge Team to collect, evaluate, and implement program requirements information. This team liaises with admissions offices to ensure ApplyBoard’s pre-screening aligns with their processes.

Candidate Evaluation

Once the student has completed their application, submitted all necessary documents, and paid the application fee, we run a series of automated checks to ensure the student’s information is accurate, valid, and legible:

If any of these processes detect an issue, ApplyBoard’s CX Evaluations Team receives an alert and a CX officer can then check the application manually.

If the CX officer determines the issue is minor, they can request further information from the applicant. For more serious issues, such as if they suspect an applicant or document is not bona fide, they can cancel the application.

ApplyBoard’s Evaluations Team is highly localized. Transcripts are verified by team members in the applicant’s region, who are familiar with the local education system and can communicate fluently with students and recruitment partners in their preferred language.

As a final step, our Evaluations Team conducts additional manual reviews to ensure students meet all necessary admissions requirements. These include reviewing courses required, previous study and work experience, study gaps, previous rejection cases for similar students, and additional documents. If a CX officer determines that an applicant does not, in fact, meet the admissions requirements, they can cancel the application.

If a CX officer cancels an application, the application immediately goes to another CX officer to review and confirm. If this second officer agrees with the decision, the recruitment partner and student are notified of the reason for cancellation. They may initiate a follow-up review, if desired.

The Results

Half of all applications submitted to ApplyBoard are not passed on to institutions. This ensures admissions teams spend time reviewing only strong and complete applications, streamlining the admissions process. And by accelerating the admissions process, we help reduce application turnaround time and maximize acceptance rates.

ApplyBoard’s rigorous pre-screening process has enabled us to achieve an acceptance rate of over 95% for our students. In cases where partners provide us with consistent detailed updates, we’ve increased this rate to over 99%.

Case Study: University of Manitoba

As a U15 school, the University of Manitoba (UM) is in high demand among international students. When Canada’s profile as an education destination exploded in the late 2010s, so did international student application volumes at UM. With the university’s small admissions team struggling to keep up with the demand, UM’s leadership turned to ApplyBoard for help.

Recognizing that every institution’s application process is different, ApplyBoard’s Partner Relations team sat down with the admissions professionals at UM to understand their unique pain points. Together, they established a set of criteria against which to evaluate UM applicants.

Today, 40% of the applications that ApplyBoard vets for UM are not submitted due to ineligibility. This has freed up UM’s admissions team to focus on the strongest applications, drastically reducing UM’s acquisition cost per student. Just as important, UM applicants now get letters of acceptance (LOAs) back in as little as two weeks, maximizing the chance they’ll accept.

Document Authentication

Applications submitted through ApplyBoard always achieve a certain standard of quality, thanks to our pre-screening process. However, document authenticity is a different story entirely. An application might check all the right boxes, but what if key documents, like proof of acceptance, financial support, or language proficiency, are falsified?

Thankfully, ApplyBoard has a solution to that as well. ApplyBoard enables secure document authentication, thanks to our secure, sector-leading ApplyProof solution.
Learn more in our next entry into the Strengthening the Sector series, hosted right here on ApplyInsights.

About the ApplyInsights Team