Background: A Growing Transfer Population, One Evaluator
Salisbury University enrolls around 8,000 students within the University System of Maryland, drawn heavily to a competitive, accredited business school and a well-regarded nursing program. Many of them arrive as transfers, some carrying 60, 70, or more credits from community colleges and out-of-state schools across the mid-Atlantic.
For years, every one of those transcripts passed through one person: Tessa Gallagher. At the time she was the registrar’s office transfer credit evaluator, the sole reviewer of every admitted student’s transfer record. Today she is Salisbury’s Assistant Registrar for Transfer Services. We spoke with her about what changed.
The Challenge: Electronic, but Still Entered by Hand
Salisbury had already moved away from paper-based workflows. Transcripts arrived electronically, rather than being printed in admissions and carried across the street in interoffice mail. That shift had pulled turnaround from three or four weeks down to about two. But electronic delivery didn’t remove the real bottleneck: every course still had to be keyed, by hand, into PeopleSoft.
“Even though it was all electronic, I was still manually inputting every course into our student information system.”
With one support person handling data entry and Tessa doing the final review, a heavy transfer record could sit in the queue for a week or more, and a student arriving with 60 or 70 credits meant a long afternoon of typing.
She knew there had to be something better and started her search. At a 2019 AACRAO tech-and-transfer meeting, a fellow transfer evaluator mentioned a solution they found: Smart Panda Tools. Tessa researched Raptor and made the case to her leadership with a single number: she believed she could take posting time from about three weeks down to three days. That was enough. Salisbury partnered with us in 2021.
The Solution: Raptor for the Keystrokes, RuleMaker for the Coverage
Raptor removed the keystrokes. Rather than anyone retyping every course, Raptor structures each incoming transcript into verified data, and Tessa reviews it against the source document and pushes it through. Posting time fell from roughly three weeks to two or three days, and because Salisbury begins posting credit at admission rather than at matriculation, students can see their credit early, while they are still deciding where to enroll.
The bigger surprise, for Tessa, was the rules. Salisbury had built roughly 12,000 to 13,000 articulation rules in PeopleSoft, mostly for the community colleges it drew from most. Extending that coverage to the out-of-state and repeat schools she saw every cycle meant navigating five separate PeopleSoft tables for each rule, work she didn’t have the bandwidth for. With RuleMaker, that became a single click.
“I love that Raptor can read everything and does it so well, but it was RuleMaker that really made the difference.”
Salisbury’s rule count has since grown to more than 30,000, more than doubling its coverage. That coverage did more than save time. Because each equivalency now runs from an applied rule rather than a case-by-case judgment, the same incoming course is treated the same way every time, which means fewer appeals and fewer surprises for students.
Operational Results: Faster Turnaround, and Steady When It Mattered Most
Raptor took posting time from about three weeks to two or three days. That speed proved its worth during an unplanned stretch of short-staffing. Tessa’s data-entry colleague went out on medical leave near Thanksgiving and later retired, at a point when the office was also without its lead registrar and its functional analyst.
In a manual workflow, a gap like that means the backlog grows and students are the ones left waiting on their credit. Because Raptor had already taken the hand-entry out of the process, the office could keep credit moving and keep students served through the crunch, rather than the work stalling while the team was rebuilt.
“There was absolutely no way I could have even thought, ‘I can do this,’ without Raptor.”
As the office came back to full strength, Tessa trained the new functional analyst on Raptor, and with the queue reliably under control, that reclaimed time went toward the work that needs a person’s judgment rather than a person’s typing.
Strategic Impact: A Clear Answer for Students, Before They Enroll
Those rules also fed something students could see for themselves. Through Gateway, Salisbury’s student-facing portal, a prospective transfer can enter their courses, choose a major, and see a preview of how their credit is likely to apply, closely mirroring the academic requirements they would face once they enroll. They can also pull the full list of known equivalencies between their school and Salisbury, and compare, for instance, whether a given accounting course lands as elective credit or as managerial accounting credit.
“Having that visibility has been a huge help.”
And Gateway is not only for applicants. The admissions and advising teams use the same portal to answer transfer questions with real, rules-based answers rather than estimates, so a prospective student, the person recruiting them, and the person advising them are all looking at the same clear picture.
The work itself grew, too. With the queue under control, Tessa moved up from transfer credit evaluator to Assistant Registrar for Transfer Services, taking on course-permission approvals, cross-campus enrollment, and transfer appeals, the higher-value transfer work that consistent, automated evaluation finally left room for.
There was absolutely no way I could have even thought, “I can do this,” without Raptor.
— Tessa Gallagher, Assistant Registrar for Transfer Services, Salisbury University