AppointLink was a first-time participant at the 2023 AACRAO Annual Meeting in Aurora, Colo., a premier national conference for college Registrars, and it was well worth the flight! We enjoyed speaking with Registrars from around the country about how AppointLink’s Higher Ed IT Power Tools are optimizing academic administration processes which increasingly cause friction and slow education at law & business schools.

Right from the start, we noticed Registrars were communicating similar frustrations about their university’s longstanding methods of grading, exam scheduling, and classroom management. This came to light during a presentation conducted by Ary Isenberg, our Product Manager for System Integrations who previously served as Associate Registrar for Exams and Grades at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.

Ary’s presentation was of high interest and drew upward of 40 attendees, almost all of whom concurred when asked about the common struggles they experience. We heard these folks loud and clear: they believe traditional exam scheduling and grading collection processes are a drain on staff time and resources. They acknowledged that enforcing institutional policies while collecting grades can be difficult. Many institutions have become over reliant on outdated and unsecured methods of grade collection like spreadsheets and email.

The Registrars also confirmed that sharing exam schedules with students is challenging and can cause them undue stress and anxiety. They expressed concern over the lack of a reliable method to manually track and assign extra exam time to students with disabilities.

Fortunately, thanks to advancements in technology, there are modern solutions to these longstanding challenges.

Ary explained how AppointLink’s complementary exam scheduling and grading tools can expand capabilities for students, professors and administrators, easing the frustrations these audiences commonly associate with these key academic functions. Institutions that have implemented these tools have experienced improved staff productivity and eliminated tedious work while becoming more effective and compliant with institutional policies.

We partnered with one of our university clients, Cardozo School of Law, to create a case study examining how they directly benefitted from our digital grading tool. We discovered that after implementing the tool, their three-person registrar staff saved 225 hours of administrative work (over prior year) during a three-week grading “crunch time” period at the end of the semester. This led to a massive reduction in grading-related admin work, with only 16 hours spent – a remarkable 92% reduction in labor hours!

At Cardozo, the tool has eliminated all the nuances and complexities of the manual grading process. Registrar staff no longer need to work long hours or miss important events to ensure grading is handled correctly.

Instructors can grade as soon as they want, and Registrar staff can once again focus on other important administrative tasks key to student and institutional success.

During Ary’s presentation, we had the pleasure of hearing from several of our existing customers, including Jeannine Englert from Cardozo, who shared her experience with our grading tool and how it “changed her life.” We were absolutely thrilled to hear Jeannine’s impassioned testimonial of the product. We cannot thank Jeannine and Cardozo enough for sharing their successes and being part of our case study.

In today’s world, where universities are facing significant constraints with overworked staff and limited productivity hours, it’s crucial to find ways to streamline processes that directly improve the student experience. This is just one example of how AppointLink’s academic technology tools are making common issues in higher education a thing of the past.

If your current methods of grading, exam scheduling, and classroom management are lacking in functionality and causing frustration, now is a great time to consider an AppointLink IT solution. Don’t let current systems adversely impact your students, professors, and admin staff.

If there’s one thing we learned from AACRAO, it’s that there’s no shortage of challenges keeping Registrars awake at night. If we did not have the pleasure of meeting you at AACRAO, we invite you to engage with AppointLink by joining our mailing list, following us on LinkedIn, or scheduling a demo to learn how we can help reduce friction at your university and keep education moving forward.