Background: First in Transfer, and Growing
UNC Charlotte enrolls roughly 33,000+ students and has the largest transfer population of any campus in the UNC system. With the enrollment cliff ahead, the university’s growth strategy is leaning into adult learners and transfer students, which makes transfer credit evaluation a front-line function rather than a back-office one.
Transfer credit articulation moved to the Registrar’s Office in 2023, and we spoke with Dr. Jonathan Reece, University Registrar, about what came next.
The Challenge: Three Evaluators and a Manual Queue
Every transfer course that arrived was entered by hand. Where an equivalency rule already existed, the match could be made. Where it didn’t, someone had to research it.
“We have folks in these roles who have college degrees, and they’re doing data entry. It’s a waste of resources.”
The backlog was structural, not occasional.
“During a traditional mid-season flow, we’d be about a week and a half to two weeks behind. Going into peak season, we could very easily be three or four weeks behind.”
That gap impacted students. When registration and orientation arrived, advisors often didn’t have what they needed to advise, because the evaluation was still in the queue. The office triaged as best it could, prioritizing students with advising appointments, but it was working from behind.
The practice at the time reflected those constraints. The office evaluated only after a student was admitted and all their transcripts had arrived; doing otherwise would have left an already-stretched team in worse shape. The trade-off was that credit was settled after the admission decision rather than informing it, and a student who had attended four schools waited on the slowest one.
The Solution: A Suite Shaped to Charlotte's Rules
The evaluation work happens in the Student Mobility Suite. Raptor extracts and structures every incoming transcript, and Equate applies Charlotte’s equivalency rules, so an evaluator opens a structured record with the institution’s logic already applied rather than a document to re-type.
Connecting that work to Banner was the open question. Charlotte wasn’t an Ellucian Ethos campus, and a packaged connector wasn’t going to fit the way the institution worked. So rather than adapt Charlotte to a standard integration, Smart Panda and integration partner BeBravo built a custom read/write API with them, one of the first of its kind, which meant more discovery and more testing than a standard deployment.
“I originally expected to go live within a few weeks of contract negotiations being finalized. It took longer than expected. But looking back on that now, I wouldn’t trade it for the world, because we got to build it the way we wanted to build it.”
That was the trade Charlotte made deliberately: time up front, in exchange for infrastructure that synced with and updated their policies in real time.
“It does everything and more than what I expected it to do, and it’s unique to our needs.”
The connection runs in both directions. Verified credit is written straight into the student’s academic history, and when an evaluator researches a new course and builds an equivalency, that rule is created in Banner automatically.
“When we build equivalencies out for a student in Equate, it also builds the rule for us in Banner, so the next student benefits from that research.”
The build didn’t stop at extraction and structuring. Institutional and state policies that used to depend on someone remembering them are now flagged automatically:
- The 64-hour cap. Charlotte limits transferable credit from two-year institutions. The Suite flags any file that exceeds it, so the credit can be reduced to policy.
- The American Democracy requirement. UNC system campuses honor one another’s completion of the requirement. The Suite reads the notation on an incoming transcript and flags it, so Charlotte can grant the exemption instead of making the student retake the course.
- Transferred general education. The same applies to students who have completed Gen Ed requirements at another UNC campus: the notation is flagged, the exemption granted, and the student moves straight into their major.
Operational Results: From Weeks Behind to Done Shortly After Lunch
The queue that used to define the office is as good as gone.
“During non-peak times, a lot of times my team is done shortly after lunch, with all the transcripts that came in from the day before.”
“For our feeder schools, we can get those done in around 60 seconds. Non-feeder schools can be three to five minutes, and that’s primarily because we’re stopping to go through catalogs and determine equivalencies for courses we’ve never seen before.”
Peak volume is absorbed rather than deferred. On a normal day, Charlotte might receive around 60 transcripts. At peak, that can rise to roughly 150 arriving in a single day, and even then the team works through the volume in about two days.
The practice changed with the capacity. Charlotte no longer waits for a complete file or an admission decision. A transcript is processed the day after it arrives, whether or not the student has been admitted, and whether or not their other transcripts have landed.
Strategic Impact: Credit That Informs the Admission Decision
Evaluating earlier changed something more consequential than turnaround time. Because articulated credit is now available before the admission decision, the admissions office can see it while making that decision.
“Students could now move into their majors a lot faster, because the information is in front of them when they’re making the admissions decision, as opposed to admitting them one way and then doing the articulation later.”
For Charlotte’s more selective programs, the ones with prerequisite and GPA requirements, that is the difference between a student entering as ‘pre-business’ or ‘undeclared’ and entering their intended major directly.
The team’s work changed with it. They now run roughly 20 data-integrity reports daily, cleaning up historical records and catching problems before they reach advisors.
“We’re actually using our brainpower now, as opposed to monotonous data entry work.”
The build also continues, and not always at Charlotte’s prompting. When our Equate Approval Hub was developed for another institution, routing suggested equivalencies to the right person for review before they become permanent rules, Smart Panda reached out to offer it to Charlotte and turned it on for them.
“We didn’t ask for that, but it’s been helpful. We love that feature. It’s fantastic…That’s looking out for us, even though I didn’t even ask the question.”
Smaller requests move the same way. A partner high school reports grades with “Satisfactory” written out in full, which Charlotte’s Banner grade tables can’t accept, so staff had been converting each one by hand. Jonathan flagged it, and the conversion was automated within a day.
I don’t feel like it’s a canned solution at all. It’s an evolutionary solution.
— Dr. Jonathan Reece, University Registrar, UNC Charlotte