By Ben Hubbard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008

Virginia students applying to college might soon be able to submit transcripts electronically, saving school systems printing and postage costs and decreasing the chances that valuable paperwork will get lost in the mail.

The state Education Department is testing such a program with nine school systems and George Mason and James Madison universities. Among the participants is the Prince William County system, the state's second-largest.

The program, developed through a $6.1 million grant from the U.S. Education Department, seeks to improve the speed and accuracy with which data are transferred from high schools to universities, said Bethann Canada, director of educational information management for the state education agency. If the test proves successful, students in up to 30 school systems might be able to use it next school year.

Typically, students applying for college ask guidance counselors to print and mail transcripts. That takes time from counselors, Canada said, with no guarantee transcripts will arrive.

Under the program, counselors will log on to the National Transcript Center, an electronic liaison for academic data, and select the university to which the student is applying. The university admissions office will then be notified of incoming data, which it can download.

"It's about efficiency," Canada said of the new system. "It's about redirecting the guidance counselors to more important tasks, and it's about the quality of data."

Admissions officers at participating universities also see promise.

"The potential is huge for this technology once it is fully implemented," said Joe Manning, associate director of admissions at James Madison in Harrisonburg. "It has huge implications for the college admissions process."

Although most of James Madison's application process has become electronic -- 99 percent of the 19,500 freshman applications last year were submitted online -- the university until now has received only paper transcripts, Manning said. Admissions staff must enter data into a student's profile manually. That takes time.

But the program "will significantly improve the evaluation that we are now doing by hand and speed up the process in order to spend more time evaluating other parts of the application a student is presenting," Manning said.

"It's a huge advantage to students in terms of timing," said Andrew Flagel, dean of admissions at George Mason in Fairfax County.

The program relies on schools to use national standards known as the Schools Interoperability Framework for the storage of student information, which allows institutions to transfer electronic data even if they use different software.

How widely the program will be used will depend on testing scheduled to run through the middle of this month. Canada said no transcripts have been sent yet.

In addition to Prince William, initial participants are Amherst, Bedford, Botetourt, Highland, Nelson, Poquoson, Rockbridge and Louisa counties.