“AdmitMe” Admissions Project

Business Requirements

Overview

The goal of the AdmitMe Admissions Project is to provide a central repository of credentials for high school students transitioning into higher education. These credentials will initially be created when high school students enroll for standardized exams conducted by College Board and ACT. Earlier opportunities to create credentials will always be considered. Exam proctors will verify identities of the individuals represented by these credentials when tests are taken. Each student will have a unique identifier.

These credentials and unique identifiers will enable improvements in the entire process, and will help all parties involved in the process. Creation and maintenance costs incurred by each organization that currently maintain student identity stores will drop. Admissions portals will become more useful as they are able to provide one-stop shopping with single sign-on for students wanting to forward certified copies of transcripts, test scores, and letters of recommendations to the schools of their choice. Schools will be able to receive complete ‘admissions packages’ from students with all data strongly associated with the appropriate student. Schools who wish to provision temporary accounts to prospective students will be able to automate the process.

Business Requirements

1. A 3rd party central authority (AdmitMe) must be established to hold credentials of high school students transitioning into higher education.
   1. These credentials must uniquely identify individual students so that vendor-specific data can be associated with a student across vendors.
   2. This store must hold most (all) user information that is common amongst participating vendors.
   3. This store must enable each participant to accurately match vendor-specific data with a student, and with vendor-specific data of other vendors.
   4. There must be policies that address the appropriate management of privacy and defines who sets these policies and monitors compliance with these policies.
   5. AdmitMe must have mechanisms for account maintenance and user support.
      1. We need some language here to describe what AdmitMe must be able to do.
      2. We need some language here to describe what users should be able to do.
      3. AdmitMe must be able to pick out and handle duplicate entries.
      4. All pages that interact with AdmitMe must be co-branded with AdmitMe branding and the referring vendors branding. Vendors (College Board and ACT, all) must be able to maintain branding, but it must be clear that AdmitMe is involved.
      5. Students must be able to initially self-register to this 3rd party authority via vendor portals.
         1. Students must understand that they are registering at AdmitMe for access to the vendor they are trying to connect with.
         2. Students must be able to opt out of AdmitMe. The registration page must clearly describe exactly what the students are registering for, and the differences between opting in to AdmitMe vs. opting out and registering only for the referring vendor. NOTE: The Opt-Out feature was discussed during the last call, but it may lead to more complications then we want to address. If a user opts out, what does their login experience look like? This can lead to very confusing user interfaces. Are we willing to leave it to good documentation to explain to the users what they’re about to experience if they opt out? How important is the opt-out feature?
         3. Vendors will maintain vendor-specific data about users. They will not have to maintain credentials and defined “common” attributes about any user who has opted in to the AdmitMe system.
         4. The system must allow exam proctors to submit the results of photo ID checks and other vendor activities that validate student identities.