In addition to the world of work, the digital transformation is also increasingly making its way into the education sector. However, there is still a lot of work to be done around organizational issues and administrative solutions for certain processing steps. When we think of school reports, the first thing that comes to mind is a folder or dossier containing the printed school reports with the grades for the individual subjects. In contrast to application processes for a job, which are now mainly carried out online, school, baccalaureate and university degrees or qualification certificates come in written form. Paper documents in the education system should still be the standard in 2021? The time is ripe for a change once and for all. For applying institutions, such as a university, to process credentials for this, integrating intelligent AI-based OCR is key in many ways.
The admission paths to various secondary schools are basically fixed; school reports after secondary school form the basis for admission or refusal to transfer to one of the numerous high schools. With the Matura certificate (in Switzerland), the Gymnasium period is finally concluded with hopefully respectable grades. This, in turn, is one of the keys to transfer to a higher education program at one of the institutions that offer it, be it a university, a university of applied sciences, a university of teacher education, and so on and so forth. As an applying institution, the pre-sorting and sorting out of the inherent credential documents is an essential and at the same time also an extremely lengthy process. The status quo at institutions is an outdated one, digital technology offers more contemporary and efficient solutions here.
The school and baccalaureate certificates in paper form are either sent by their carriers, the students, by mail (but probably hardly ever) or at best at least scanned and then sent as a PDF attachment in an e-mail to the institution of choice. Depending on the university, that’s a lot of Matura certificates that have to be received, checked and processed for each course of study. If there really is a team of employees behind this, then this processing process is anything but progressive and hardly desirable from the point of view of a university, for example. The following shows that this also works differently. Functionality is essential for an institution.
In the case of using institutions, functionality comprises three main points:
- System task: The school or baccalaureate certificates are received and must be checked
- Main need: The efficient and automatic checking and further processing of the received school reports/matriculation certificates
- Interaction: The automatic receipt, the automatic validation and the automatic extraction of all relevant data, i.e. the individual grades for the individual subjects from the school reports / baccalaureate certificates and the names of the candidate
The system task and the main need for the applying institution are clear, the interaction for this provides the integration of the intelligent, AI-based OCR. After receiving the school reports/matriculation certificates, whether still in paper form or in PDF format, the intelligent software extracts all the data and processes it completely automatically. The manual process around verifying the school reports is completely eliminated as a result of the integration of the intelligent, AI-based OCR, which relieves employees enormously. The newly freed up time resources can definitely be put to better use elsewhere than in the tedious and boring process of checking and typing up report cards. However, processing school reports using intelligent, AI-based OCR offers even more advantages. The relevant data, i.e. grades and names, which have been extracted once, can also be automatically transferred to downstream specialized processes, eliminating the need for further data entry or recording. This data is similarly valuable during a semester abroad, for example, where it can be easily exchanged between partner universities. This saves unnecessary administrative work and thus a considerable amount of time and effort.
The benefits around the automatic extraction of relevant grades and names by intelligent, AI-based OCR for school and baccalaureate certificates are numerous and of considerable importance for the applying institutions.
