NursingCAS Dispatch
Stay Connected & Informed
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August 2020
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The NursingCAS Dispatch is a monthly newsletter intended to keep you up to date with current happenings at NursingCAS. The newsletter will feature:
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| NURSINGCAS & COVID-19 | |||
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COVID-19 Impact Questions Added to the 20-21 Application
To better assess the impact of COVID-19 on applicants, NursingCAS has added the OPTIONAL questions below for the 2020-21 cycle. If you need to remove a similar custom question from your application, please contact Stephanie Wurth.
All questions below are optional. If your pathway to nursing school was affected by COVID-19, please utilize this space to describe how you were impacted.
a. Academic: Were you able to interact with your professors? Did you have to leave an academic program stateside or abroad? Did your school require you to move to Pass/Fail systems? Did your standardized tests or entrance exam get cancelled, delayed? Other academic barriers?
b. Professional: Did you hold a job? Did have to go out and seek new job opportunities? Did you lose a job? Other financial or professional barriers that you faced?
c. Personal: Did you have to move out of a house or dorm? Did you have to cancel travel plans? Did you modify your planned experiences related to healthcare or volunteer opportunities? Did you seek out volunteer opportunities that arose from the crisis? Did help family members that were affected? |
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Successful NursingCAS 2020-21 Cycle Launch & Next Steps for Programs in DRAFT Status
The NursingCAS 2020-2021 cycle launch was successful! Out of 2,927 participating programs, 1,384 programs (47%) are now live and collecting applications. Since August 13, over 4,200 applicants have created a NursingCAS account in the 2020-2021 cycle. Over 6,700 applications are already in-progress.
The NursingCAS team continues to review and push programs live in the 2020-2021 cycle. If your programs are still in “Draft” status, please submit them for review at least 1 week prior to your planned launch date in the 2020-2021 NursingCAS Prelaunch Environment. Upon submission, please notify Karen Jacobs, NursingCAS Account Manager, and Joe Clark, Client Success Manager, for the pages to launch. The NursingCAS Team will review your pages and possibly request edits from your school before pushing programs live. Please allow time for necessary edits and resubmission. Additional resources are available for help including the Configuration Training Webinar on-demand and FAQs for school users. |
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Managing Overlapping Cycles
As the newly extended 2019-20 NursingCAS cycle will overlap with the 2020-21 NursingCAS cycle for 5 months, AACN has provided guidance and options to ensure that students can access your programs in the correct cycle. All schools are encouraged to update their website links as soon as possible with one of three options outlined in this communication. If programs do not update the links on their institutional websites, applicants will not be able to access their programs in the new 2020-21 cycle. |
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2020-21 NursingCAS Renewal Form AACN requires all schools to agree to participation terms by completing AACN’s NursingCAS Renewal Form. If your school has not submitted the agreement for the 2020-21 NursingCAS cycle, please complete it by Friday, September 4. The form should take approximately 10 minutes to complete.
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NursingCAS Coupon Codes Available Schools can purchase coupon codes to waive initial application fees and incentivize students to apply to their programs. Coupon codes are now available for both 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 NursingCAS cycles. To learn more, visit the NursingCAS Application Coupon Codes page. Please contact the NursingCAS Team at nursingcas@aacnnursing.org with questions about coupon codes. |
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This section provides monthly updates on new features and enhancements available within the Applicant Portal, Configuration Portal, and WebAdMIT, as well as information on upcoming training events and opportunities.
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WebAdMIT Enhancements Please review the Shared Lookup Table Updates for Fall 2020 page, and if you’re exporting data into a campus system, work with your IT team to determine if updates need to be made. If a “crosswalk” was created from WebAdMIT data to local data in your campus system’s SIS/CRM, it may need to be updated for the newly added options. Many fields within the NursingCAS application have predefined answer values that applicants can select from; for example, the Country and County fields both have predefined answer values. These values are housed in shared “lookup tables,” which are viewable in the NursingCAS Customer Export Layout (CEL). Please review the timeline and additional information on the Fall 2020 Shared Lookup Table Updates page for guidance on optimal implementation. The new predefined answer values that applicants can select from will be updated on September 13, 2020. If these fields are imported directly from WebAdMIT to another system, these new options will begin appearing in the export files as applicants select them.
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Update to Transfer Settings WebAdMIT’s Transfer Settings feature allows users to transfer templates from a previous cycle to a current cycle. Report Manager templates are now included in Transfer Settings. If the report is linked to a list of applicants that does not exist in the new cycle, the report will use the “Everyone” default in the List dropdown. Additionally, if the report is linked to Work Groups that do not exist in the new cycle, those Work Groups will be removed from the report template.
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When users now transfer templates from one cycle to another, the sort order for all templates in the new cycle now matches the sort order from the previous cycle. For example, if Local Statuses are sorted as Local Status 1, Local Status 2, Local Status 3, etc. in the previous cycle, they will keep this sort order in the new cycle.
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Update to Evaluations Report The applicant-based Evaluations Report includes all of the requested and completed evaluations for each applicant. Two columns have been added to this report: Applicant First Name and Applicant Last Name. If a “crosswalk” was created from WebAdMIT data to local data in your campus system’s SIS/CRM for this report, it may need to be updated for the newly added options. Work with your IT team to determine if updates need to be made.
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Update to Templates Using Deleted Lists WebAdMIT allows users to group and manage applicants by common criteria using Lists. Once a list is created, users can access it as needed and perform various actions. Previously when a list was deleted, any exports, reports, and PDF templates built using this list were also deleted. With this enhancement, when a list is deleted, any associated exports, reports, and PDF templates are updated to run on all applicants (i.e., Everyone) instead. This ensures that templates tied to lists are not automatically deleted.
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Update to Admissions Users Report The Admissions Users report lists user names, email addresses, user roles/Work Groups, and more for each WebAdMIT user. This report is now updated to only pull the admissions users for the CAS and cycle a user is working in. For example, if the report is pulled in the NursingCAS 2020-2021 cycle, then only the admissions users that have the NursingCAS 2020-2021 cycle added to their account appear. Previously, this report pulled admissions users for all the CASs and cycles that a user had access to, which was especially problematic for institution managers who had access to many CASs and cycles.
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Letters by Liaison Enhancement |
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Update to required fields when creating a Letters by Liaison account
Letters by Liaison is a portal for recommenders to electronically submit letters of recommendation. When creating an account, recommenders are now required to include their professional details, including occupation, organization, job title, and phone number.
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CAS API Enhancements Update to CAS API settings
CAS API is used to integrate the applicant data coming from the applications with institution’s SIS/ERP system. Users are now able to subscribe to program’s/organization’s “Create” and “Update” events. When a new program or organization is created, or either are updated, the CAS API will push these records to the destination configured in the subscription request. This pattern can be used when a user wants to be notified that the specified event occurred. This includes any changes made through the Configuration Portal; the event API will be triggered when updates are saved.
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WebAdMIT API Enhancements
Update to the WebAdMIT API Documentation
The WebAdMIT API documentation now includes information on how to pull the SSN Documents file using the WebAdMIT API feature. This will allow schools to receive an encrypted file that contains the applicant’s CAS ID and SSN.
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New Documentation
To work more efficiently in WebAdMIT, review Liaison’s template naming tips for local statuses, exports, custom fields, email templates, and more.
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There are various Question Rules available in the Configuration Portal, including question visibility, program availability, fee waiver qualification, and more. To identify which question types to use with each Question Rule, review Liaison’s chart to learn more about questions and Question Rule compatibility.
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When creating custom GPA calculations in WebAdMIT, it can be challenging to determine which of the available features (e.g. Local GPAs, Prerequisite GPAs in WebAdMIT, Prerequisites in the Configuration Portal) is best for your process. Review Liaison’s scenarios for guidance.
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Training Opportunities The following FREE webinars and virtual training are available for September 2020:
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If you have any questions, please contact Stephanie Wurth, AACN’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, at swurth@aacnnursing.org.
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