Thebes

Each student applying to a postsecondary institution must provide a transcript of courses completed. In years past, the transcripts were paper sent by the high school to each school the student applied to. More often than not, today the transcript is electronic, but not always transferred in a standards compliant or automated way. Each school manually sends an electronic image of the student’s transcript. But rarely is this information available in a machine readable format. Work is being done to create a standard format for these transcripts. The Thebes network can be used to locate the transcript information from high schools and negotiate the transfer to the higher education institutions automatically when the student applies. Policies would enforce the registrar’s attributes and student approval prior to release of the transcripts. As a part of the application process, the higher education institution’s systems can automatically request information from the high school system of record and accept the transcript into the admissions process.

Additionally, when students transfer from one school to another, a certified transcript must be sent. The authentication and authorization processes built into Thebes can ensure the transcript request is valid and authorized and that the transcript response is the official transcript and is not modified by anyone.

As with other database examples, this mechanism can improve data quality by keeping as close to the source as possible, and make data access near real-time by replacing batch transaction with instant searches for data across all schools the student has attended.

Actors:

Students: By using the Thebes software and network, the students may be mostly removed from the process of sending and verifying transcripts. The student will log in using credentials assigned when first enrolled, and list the schools the transcripts should be made available to. Once the student consents to having the transcripts made available to a list of schools, the rest of the process can continue without the intervention of the student. This eases the application and the admissions process for the students. Students can check to see which schools have accessed their records.

Admissions Office: Each admissions office spends thousands of hours per year getting and processing high school transcripts from every student that applies. By joining the Thebes network, the process of retrieving the transcript data can be completely automated. Collecting standardized machine readable transcripts will allow for automated comparisons of students. This allows the admissions officer to spend their valuable time making the admissions decisions and not wasting time collecting data.

High School System Administrators: Each high school or school district will join the Thebes network in order to have their student’s information sent automatically to the higher education institutions. The same system will allow the local school districts access to the aggregated data about the performance of each individual school, teacher, and student. The biggest benefit, though, for the school district is that there is no need for separate authentication and authorization from the over 6,000 postsecondary schools across the nation.

School districts: There is considerable and growing pressure on school districts to account for the quality of education provided. Standardized machine readable transcript formats combined with the ability to search all schools in the system with a single sign-on will provide instant and comprehensive data studies. The ability to collect individual and aggregated data about student, school, and teacher performance and compare this data against test scores will empower school districts to take positive action to concentrate on troubled schools.

Local, state, and national education officials: The ability to instantly access highly detailed education data creates a new level of oversight of the entire educational process. This satisfies federal mandates.