One complaint I remember hearing while working at Veracross was that there was no way to digitally review transcripts in the parent or student portal. This meant any transcript review (GPA, Awards, and/or Notes), had to be done via a physical mailing. While mailing is not difficult to do via a batch print of the documents and using the Letters and Envelopes query visualization to make the mailing, this process is not paperless and requires significant time from your academic offices.
Now though with the Academic Document enhancements that Veracross has completed, it is possible to publish Transcripts to the Parent, Student, and even Faculty portals.
Great! So how is it done??
The first thing you are going to need to do is to add a new Academic Document record with the correct School Year and Grading Period:
After the record is added, you can continue to the 'Configuration' tab and complete the configuration work, add the grade level(s), Report Title, and mark if you would like included in the Faculty Portal.
The second thing you are going to need to do is to download the transcripts from Axiom. This can be done easily from the Academics Documents homepage -> Transcript -> select the desired Layout (you may need to create an unofficial transcript to show to parents and students) -> Browse Documents link -> Filter documents -> Download All (select 'Download ZIP').
The third step would be associating the downloaded transcripts with the Academic Document records that were created in Step 1. To do this, return to the Academic Document record and go to the 'Files' tab -> add the File Batch record with the 'Mapping Type' of 'Manifest File Provided'. Veracross documentation walks through this process very clearly here.
Tip: You can use Veracross queries to copy and paste data out of Veracross and into the manifest file to easily create the manifest file
After the files are associated with the student's academic documents the last step you need to do is, **drum roll please**, publish them to the desired portal(s). This process mirrors the publishing of report cards or progress reports. Parents and students will then be able to see the transcript in their portal:
So that is the technical side of things. At this point, it is about managing the parents and students. We communicated with our 12th-grade parents and students via Composer, sharing screenshots of where they should expect to find the transcripts. We also shared a google form with our students to confirm that all the transcript items, credits, GPA, etc., were correct. If they were not correct, we corrected the underlying transcript data and re-uploaded the individual transcript to the portal. And when this window of transcript review was up, we simply batch-update the 'Display Status' to remove them from the portals.
Note: Don't forget that these files are not 'live', as soon as they are downloaded from Veracorss no changes will be reflected on the transcript.
This process saved us time, and paper, and made the experience easier for our families and College Counselling Office. Our CCO in particular was able to expedite a process that before took weeks and turned into days.
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