🤔 Unfamiliar Academic Terminology

Many Slate users come to Slate from the world of academia, but others have little to no direct prior experience in higher ed. For those Slaters, academic jargon can be unfamiliar, or even foreign. Here are some phrases and terms that might be of use to those newly-minted Slaters.

• CAS - This will usually be combined with another word (EngineeringCAS, NursingCAS, GradCAS, etc). CAS stands for Centralized Application Service and essentially refers to an application which is hosted by a third party to be filled out & then submitted to schools rather than hosted by each school separately. Thus, the school has limited control over the specific data sought & supplied by the application. CAS applications are beneficial to applicants as they only have to fill out an application once and then can submit it to multiple schools. Schools often elect to partner with a CAS app either due to requirements for specialized programs or as a method of reaching out to a broader audience of applicants. See the Liaison CAS Applications Integrations article in the Knowledge Base for details in importing CAS data into Slate.
• CommonApp - A centralized application for those applying at the undergraduate level. Schools allow applicants to apply via CommonApp as a way to ease the burden of applying since applicants don't need to fill out biographical and academic information again for each institution. These applications must be imported into Slate if schools want to review and decide applications in Slate. At the very least, schools would want to import these into Slate if they want provide holistic reports on their application data. See Overview: Importing the Common Application in the Slate Knowledge Base. 
• Core GPA - An applicant's GPA based only on certain core curriculum (usually Math, Science, English, & History/Social Studies). Basically, it is a GPA from only the grades that a college/university finds relevant for admissions purposes; it doesn't include grades from elective classes such as choir or woodworking.
• Cycle Prep - The process of preparing a school's Slate application & processes for a future admissions cycle. See the Technolutions Knowledge Base article for more details.
• Drip Campaign - see Nurturing Campaign below.
  
• Funnel - Institutions using Slate are often interested in data on their marketing funnel. This funnel is the picture of all of their prospects and inquiries at the top of the funnel all the way down to the enrolling students at the bottom. Leaders use this data to predict enrollment, evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing and plan for future terms. See the following webinars from Technolutions for more information: 💻 Reporting 102: Funnel Report Building Mechanics and 💻 Reporting 103: Building a Funnel Report with Configurable Joins
• Inquiry Form - A form allowing people to opt-in to marketing from an institution. These are very useful to institutions as they collect data on inquiries and do reporting on their funnel. These forms are often embedded or linked to from the school's main website and/or program-specific pages. These are often referred to as RFI (request for information) forms. 
• Nurturing Campaign - A mailing campaign, also commonly referred to as a drip campaign, is a sequence of mailings intended to encourage inquiries and other prospective students to complete an application. Each of the emails in the campaign typically focus on answering a common question or explaining a benefit of the school.
  
• Reading - This is the process whereby a school considers an application. For some schools, this may be a rather elaborate process with many different staff and/or faculty members, sometimes individually or in committees, considering various attributes of the application, weighing its strengths and weaknesses against other application. Other schools may have a simple reading process in which the application is compared against some basic requirements and the applicant is then either admitted or denied without regard to other applicants. Within Slate this often takes place within the Reader or a Workflow, though it may sometimes be done in a specialized portal.
• Response Form - A response form is filled out by admitted students to indicate whether or not they will accept their offer of admission. These forms often have rules attached to them in Slate to add additional decisions and/or payments based on their response. Institutions often have their own abbreviations for this form such as ERF (enrollment reply form) or SIR (statement of intent to register). These forms are often linked to via decision letters and the applicant's status portal. Many institutions have deadlines by which applicants must provide a response or else they are automatically flagged as having declined the offer.