Case 3 Standardizing Web Forms
Setting: Large State University; Your Position: Registrar
You work in the central administration of a large university which consists of a main campus in the provincial capital and two branch campuses, each in a major city. The campuses generally offer the same courses, and the transferring of students and their grades between campuses has been common. Until recently each campus maintained its own records and had its own web forms and systems for displaying student transcripts. When a student transferred to a different campus, his or her electronic transcript was forwarded to that campus.
The president of the university had recently approved the establishment of a centralized record-keeping function with all records maintained in a database run in the central campus but accessible from each of the two satellites. While the concept is sound, entry of records into the common database has been difficult. Mistakes in data entry have been time consuming to correct and, on occasion, embarrassing to students and to the university. It is clear that transcripts must be standardized to eliminate these errors and that there is no particular advantage to any one campus's method over the others.
In the past when you have convened a meeting of the registrars (those administrators who keep the student records) in each of the campuses to discuss policy issues, they have tended to disagree, reflecting the rivalry among the campuses. However, the nature of how transcripts are displayed is not the kind of issue about which the registrars are likely to feel strongly.