Earlier this calendar year, Liaison International, the vendor serving the Schools of Public Health Application Service (SOPHAS) launched a new feature which provides a paperless way to review applications. Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) was part of a subcommittee of schools providing specifications for this feature and fully took advantage of it upon release. This article will examine the paperless review from Harvard's perspective, but first, here is a brief description of how it works.
SOPHAS is made up of several web-based portals. The applicant portal allows prospective students to apply to the 31 accredited public schools participating in the application service. The recommender portal provides for online letters of reference. The admissions portal allows admissions officers to monitor and manage the flow of applications from SOPHAS. The new reviewer portal provides for online reviews of applications as they are updated by applicants in real time.
The reviewer portal supports the four roles that are typically involved in the review of graduate applications:
- The Reviewer is a faculty member assigned to read and rate the application. If an application is being read by more than one member of the faculty, the common practice is that they cannot see each other's reviews before doing their own.
- The Department Chair or Admissions Committee Chair makes the final decision on the application, either individually or as part of a committee. The department chair has access to all the reviews within the PDF application.
- The Department Coordinator keeps track of the applications coming into the department and assigns applications to the reviewers based on the applicant's area of interest.
- The Admissions Officer who keeps track of everything and has access to all the reviews. In some schools of public health, two or more of these roles are combined.
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The applications are presented as a PDF with bookmarks to allow for easy navigation of the application. The online review form consists of open text boxes that individual schools can customize for their evaluation needs. The reviewer completes the review by selecting the admissions decision from the drop down box provided. Through the admissions portal, the officer can see all the decisions made for a particular application through a pop-up window.
At Harvard School of Public Health, the reviewer portal was used by over half the departments in the school as a parallel process with the paper application. The faculty really liked the ability to review applications online, especially those faculty who were located in a different part of the city or who were traveling at the time of the selection process. The department coordinators and admissions officers liked the online process as it eliminated the possibility of misplaced applications.
As with any new process, once the users were fully immersed in the process, they discovered two functional areas which could be improved. First, the portal did not provide adequately for tracking admissions decisions, requiring department coordinators to keep a manual record or separate spreadsheet of the number of admits being made. Secondly, the current portal design requires the individual assignment of applications to reviewers to be done one by one, which is time-consuming for larger departments.
Liaison International is working on refining the reviewer portal for next cycle and will incorporate user feedback on these and other issues into the improvement process. The reviewer portal, as it is updated and streamlined in the upcoming year, makes a paperless admissions process a possibility for many schools of public health.
Submitted by Vincent James, Harvard School of Public Health
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