I think we can all agree that establishing an equivalency—while not always as simple as we’d all like it to be—is fairly straightforward. However, keeping existing equivalencies up-to-date is an entirely different story. One of the more challenging endeavors that transfer credit offices have to tackle is keeping their large repositories of equivalencies (often numbered in the tens of thousands) current and accurate.
TES, the Transfer Evaluation System, provides transfer Equivalency Managers with tools to assist with this activity. The Course Change Explorer is a powerful tool that lets you see what courses have changed in another institution’s catalog. The Equivalency Batch Editor: Health Check Reports help you stay on top of changes to your own courses that are have been targeted by your equivalencies.
As a TES subscriber, you can only really take full advantage of these tools if you store your equivalencies in TES. Some schools elect to store their equivalencies only in the articulation module of their SIS, while others elect to store their equivalencies only in TES. Still others prefer to have them in both TES and in the SIS. If you are one of the schools that keeps their equivalencies in both places, you have to perform maintenance on both to keep them in sync. This is not an ideal situation—but TES provides a solution! In addition to the tools described above to help you identify the necessary changes, TES includes an option to export any equivalencies you have stored in TES to a tab-delimited text file. This file includes the most critical details of your equivalencies to help keep external systems up to date.
Most of the feedback that we have received on this export file is positive. However, we have heard from several institutions that, while this export file is great, it doesn’t provide all the data needed to make updating their SIS seamless. One such element is the school code. Even though we store OPEID, IPEDS, and CEEB codes for every school in TES, the current Export File only includes the send institution’s OPEID. Though this is the most widely-used code for institutions—particularly if they participate in Federal Financial programs—most institutions don’t store the OPEID in their SIS, preferring to use FICE or CEEB codes. FICE is no longer used by the Federal Government and was replaced by the OPEID code system. CEEB codes are still widely used, especially by institutions that require College Board exams or participate in College Board scholarship programs. Most, but not all institutions have a 4-digit code assigned to them by College Board, and so many institutions use the CEEB codes as key identifiers in their SIS to identify external institutions.
Beginning November 15, 2018, TES administrators will be able to take advantage of an enhanced equivalency export. In this new export format, we will enable TES administrators to choose up to three (3) sets of institutional identifiers to be included in their export file. These identifiers are OPEID, IPEDS, and CEEB. As shown in the following screenshot, we are adding three checkboxes for these codes. These codes will appear after the “SendInstitutionCountry” column in the report, in the order they appear on the export screen.
In case you were wondering, CollegeSource collects and updates the OPEID, IPEDS, and CEEB code changes annually. We will not be adding any User-Added CEEB codes to our database, so if you have created “custom” CEEB codes at your institution, we recommend you use a secondary identifier to try to match those institutions.
Have you always wanted to use this export to facilitate (automate) the maintenance of the equivalency data in your SIS? Was it the school code data holding you back? Or maybe you just didn’t know this was available? Give this extract file to your friendly IT professional and have them map the fields in the data output to the fields in your SIS—this mapping should only need to happen once. Then you can pull this export whenever you like, pass it along, and have the updates go right into your SIS!
In my experience, I have always found that the initial request to IT goes best with a plate of baked goods! The favorite recipe of one of my previous IT contacts is Toll House Cookies… and don’t skimp on the chopped walnuts! Here’s a recipe:
Of course, you can find it right on the back of the bag of chocolate chips, as well!
If this enhance export file is a development that excites you, let us know. Feel free to share any ideas you have regarding this enhanced export file using our contact form, or in the comments below.
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