How we made a revolution in student scholarships

The new year is not far off, and hence the meetings of the 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 awarding scholarships, and, of course, a lot of work on submitting documents for the students themselves.

In this article, we will share our revolutionary experience and tell you how to completely automate the process of awarding increased scholarships, to avoid the above negative consequences, to get feedback from students and recognition that everything was fair.

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Analysis of the situation

In many universities, for the appointment of increased scholarships, the student is required to do a great job of collecting various documents, certificates, diplomas, diplomas, etc.
At the same time, without collecting all these documents together, the student cannot say with certainty whether he can apply for a scholarship or not. Many potential scholars do not receive a scholarship 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 the documents are submitted by 1000 people, 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 applying filters by the commission itself for its own discharge. In addition, the quality of verification of the documents provided by the students is reduced.

So, the cons:

• A lot of paper work for the scholarship commission
• Absolutely not transparent mechanism from the student's point of view.
• Bureaucratic delays scare students
• As a result of the previous paragraph, low competition among applicants
• Risks of mistakes
• No feedback

Solution to the problem

As a foundation for solving the problem of selecting for the purpose of increased scholarships, we decided to use the Federal rating system " LevelPride ". This system allows participants to save their achievements, maintain a portfolio and form ratings based on the achievements made.

Step 1.

During the first half of the year or before the announcement of the competition, the student electronically uploads all his achievements into the system (certificates, scientific publications, participation in a conference, etc.). An important point! Having loaded his achievements once, when submitting documents for participation in subsequent competitions, the student should only add new documents.
Already at this step, a number of advantages arise:

1. The student gets rid of the need to collect all the papers by hand.
2. No need to re-collect them
3. Even before the announcement of the competition for increased scholarships, the student can estimate the number of points that he has, compare them with those points that are necessary to obtain an increased scholarship and evaluate their strength.

Step 2

A student joins a group of applicants for higher scholarships.
The rating is automatically created, and the student can evaluate his strength, if necessary, “get” the required number of achievements.

More pluses
Transparency. 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 the question of bias.

Step 3

The moderator in the electronic form evaluates the TOP rating in the number of places allocated for the scholarship.
The system builds a preliminary rating, but it's not scary. Moderator through the system very 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 excludes the possibility of fraud and loading fake results into the system. If among the top are still fake achievements, the moderator will simply contact the participant 51 and ask him to provide documents.

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

The main problem that we were afraid of when developing a system for the assignment of increased scholarships is the possibility that the system will be filled with unreliable achievements. In practice, there were very few such cases, and the students themselves helped to find them; in the competition, they tracked all the achievements of the competitors and pessimized them even before being moderated.

Available to all

Indeed, the decision about which was told is available to everyone. It is free and completely free. All the functionality described above is available to all users of the LevelPride system. And by the way, this solution is not necessary to use for students. The same principle can be used to select applicants in organizations, for example, for bonus payments.

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