How UGA Made Submitting Transcripts Simpler

Historically, freshmen applying to the University of Georgia—and most colleges across the U.S.—have had to not only send their high school transcript to the institution but also manually write out courses they took and grades they received in application portals.

Perhaps not the most arduous part of the application, but it’s annoying, said Andy Borst, UGA’s vice provost for enrollment management. He compared it to when job applications ask applicants to both submit a résumé—and then type out their full work history in text boxes.

The current system of submitting courses and grades is also a lot of work for the admissions office to parse. That’s a big deal at UGA, where the number of applications has surged in recent years to about 51,600 in the 2025–26 application cycle.

So, the office looked for a solution. They considered using artificial intelligence, which some institutions, such as neighboring Georgia Tech and Stony Brook University in New York, have employed to extract data from transcripts. But ultimately, they realized the perfect fix might not involve creating a new tool, but leveraging an existing partnership with the state’s Student Finance Commission, which facilitates state scholarships.

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Starting in the admissions cycle that began this month, students who graduate from Georgia high schools will be able to send their electronic transcripts directly from the Georgia Student Finance Commission—which receives and standardizes their grades in order to qualify students for the state’s merit scholarship—to UGA. The move will reduce the workload for high school counselors and admissions officers alike, and will also reduce the likelihood of calculation or data-entry errors.

Inside Higher Ed spoke with Borst about the innovation. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What were the challenges you were trying to solve with this new process?

A: Our application volume, like many institutions’, [goes] up every year. We’ve had our application numbers double in the last 10 years. But the timeline by which we’re trying to turn around those decisions is the same. So, we’re still trying to get out our early-action decisions ahead of Thanksgiving for Georgia residents, and then try to get out our regular decisions out around mid-March.

But as volume goes up, the options are to either increase staffing or to find efficiencies within the application process. So as AI became available, and we started hearing and discussing with colleagues at other institutions about how they’re approaching their application volume and getting through the work, several of them talked about using AI to pull in information off of transcripts. But then they’re still left with training the AI on the thousands of different high school transcript formats that exist.

In our exploration of AI as a tool, our IT team asked, if this data already exists electronically, is there a way that we can just get it directly from the school? … Also, students and high school counselors do not like completing a self-reported academic record.

So, as a way to get past that step, we tried to find a way to get course-level information off of the transcript from an authoritative digital source and into our admission-review system.

Q: Even though you eventually decided against using AI for freshman transcripts, are there other ways you use AI in the admissions office?

A: We are currently using an AI vendor solution for our transfer applicants. It has been effective because there just aren’t as many colleges and there’s less variants in the transcripts that we’re getting because our applicants are either coming from another [University System of Georgia] school or another [Southeastern Conference] institution.

That’s been an effective tool for us that we used last year, and so that’s what led to—“This is working on the transfer side. Could this work on the freshman side?”

Q: What made your team eventually decide that AI wasn’t the right solution for the freshmen?

A: Our chief information officer encouraged the entire cabinet to not look at AI as a tool that we had to use because it was available. We were encouraged to evaluate our business processes and think, “Is there a different way that we could do this?” There is no shortage of vendors that have reached out in the last 12 months, saying, “Hey, we can help you in communicating with [prospective] students, with processing your transfer or with helping with on-campus visits,” and on down the line. AI vendors are coming out of the woodwork.

But it was that encouragement to not look to AI as something that we had to do and to first look at, 
“Is there a different way to do our business process using AI, or could we just change the business process to be more effective for the user experience without AI?”

Q: Are there any other new efficiencies UGA is considering in the application process? How does this change fit into the larger conversation about what should be included in the admissions process?

A: You may have seen recent stories about institutions moving away from having [a] supplemental essay, and I think it follows within that line of thinking. We recently removed our supplemental essay; students will still have to submit their Common App essay, so evaluating writing, and what’s in that essay, is still very much part of our review. 
But we asked our reviewers, How much value do you find in the supplemental essay? And their response was basically, We don’t really find it helpful, and so why would we ask the students to take the time to write a second essay? Why would we ask other viewers to read a second essay?
 And so that’s why we dropped it. It’s not necessarily just trying to save them time; it’s more about let’s not ask a question if we’re not going to use it in the actual admission decision.

Q: Has this process impacted how you think about the role of the transcript in the application process?

A: This gets into kind of the, “Why do colleges need course-level information?” Like, why not just give your GPA and your ACT or your test score and then base it off of that? The reality is, if we were to use a formulaic score, we would end up admitting and enrolling way more students than what we would be able to effectively serve as a campus. Like, it would negatively affect the student experience, just based off of the quality of our applicants.

GPAs are really good indicators of a student’s academic performance within a particular high school. But they are not grade measures of performance across high schools. For example, what does a 97 mean? What does a 4.2 [GPA] mean? Many folks who are not in the thick of doing admissions will hear a 4.2 and assume that a student has all A’s. It’s not grade inflation; it’s the mechanism by which schools calculate GPA. And when we are seeing a C in AP Precalc, but then an A-plus in honors choir, those two grades have different impacts on a student’s likelihood for success for our campus.

Q: It’s like you’re reading my transcript.

A: [laughs] But, that is something that a GPA just can’t tell us. What we are eventually getting to is, students will feel pressure if you have a high school that offers 40—what soon will be 42—different AP scores. To be competitive for many institutions, they feel the need to take 42 AP classes. What I’m hopeful this information will allow us to do is to look critically about what courses are students taking, what courses are most likely to suggest that a student can be successful at our college without them just having to take as many APs as possible.

Q: I think a lot of people saw this development and said, “I wish this was the case in my state,” but you’ve said this exact innovation is somewhat unique to Georgia and the systems it already has in pace. Why is that?

A: Having a statewide, authoritative source by which colleges can pull this information gives us a leg up. But that doesn’t mean that this type of information couldn’t be replicated by Common App or College Board, where we would have a standard definition.

The challenge is that there are thousands of colleges that use Common App, and how do you get all of those institutions to agree on a national standard for how that information should be entered? There’s a courses and grades section on the Common App, but it doesn’t work perfectly for students from particular countries. So, how do you make it so that it can work for all the institutions and or all of the students?
The [Georgia Student Finance Commission] gives us a step ahead, but that’s not to say that that this type of process couldn’t be figured out at a national scale.