University applications are not a fun task. Students have to sift through multiple schools to find the right fit and when they do, the real work begins. Your university admissions office has to go through thousands of applications to select the right candidates. This is an overwhelming task especially when it’s manual.

However, you can make this process easier for your staff by using a university admission form that helps you easily filter through applications to pick qualified candidates. You could even create a scorecard for the questions so you have an objective way of selecting students. Let’s look at how to simplify university admissions using this form with a step-by-step guide to help you create one.

Understanding the Importance of a University Admission Form

Your university admission form helps you collect data from prospective students to help you select the right candidates. The admissions office will then use information collected to determine if it fits your standards in a student. 

Importance of the University Admission Form

Here are some reasons why you should have a university admission form:

• Eligibility Evaluation: It creates an unbiased baseline for evaluating applicants’ qualifications.  You can set the minimum requirements for admission, like academic qualifications, test scores, and extracurricular activities. Then criticism of bias won’t come if applicants don’t meet them.
• Student profile building: Information collected on the admission form helps you build student profiles and compare them with the ideal student personas you are looking for. For example, their academic performance, personal interests, goals, and even recommendation letters can help determine a candidates fit for your university culture. 
• Resource Allocation: You can project the student intake and use it to allocate resources such as faculty recruitment, dormitory accommodation, and financial aid.

Benefits of a Well-Structured Form

A well-structured admission form puts both the students and the admission office at ease. Let’s see how:

For Applicants:

• Clarity: Applicants won’t have to struggle with understanding how to fill out the form. It also means the applicants fill out the right information, increasing their chances of being eligible for admission.
• Positive Applicant Experience: Your admission form is the first impression applicants get about your institution. As much as applicants need admission, it doesn’t have to be your school; there are many great options their tuition fee could go to if your processes are too difficult to navigate. 

For Admissions Offices:

• Efficiency: Using your form streamlines the application review process, resulting in more efficient admissions decisions. You don’t have to spend time doing back-and-forth emails with multiple applicants, all you have to do is add a QR code to your social media posts, or add to your website, even your link in your bio so applicants can easily scan and fill out the form from anywhere in the world.
• Data Accuracy: Also, your admission form helps you make sure students provide all the information you need, especially when you make these fields required. This way you prevent incomplete applications and make fair judgments when evaluating their applications.

Key Components of a University Admission Form

• Personal Information: Student’s full name, date of birth, contact details. This helps you know who is applying to your university and helps you verify their identity if need be.
• Academic Background: High school, and previous college/university details e.g. name, address, GPA, and date of graduation.
• Standardized Test Scores: SAT/ACT scores, TOEFL/IELTS scores for foreign students to know their past academic performance and predict their performance in the program they are applying for.
• Personal Statement/Essay (Optional): A student personal statement that explains why they choose your university and why they’d be great there
  
• Letters of Recommendation: This includes referee and recommendation letters from the applicant’s educators, supervisors, and guardians stating why they would be a great addition to your university. 
• Extracurricular Activities and Achievements: List of activities, leadership roles, and awards applicants have achieved showing their potential to contribute positively to the institution.
• Financial Information: As part of this process, they collect scholarship applications and financial aid details from students to collect the correct fees.
• Additional Documents: Identification documents (passport, ID card) to verify applicant identity.

Steps to Create a University Admission Form

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create your admission form with Formplus:

Step 1: Define the Purpose and Scope

• Identify Relevant Information: List all the information you need to determine a student’s fit for your institution. For example, test scores, extracurricular activities, personal statements, etc. 
• Form’s Goal: Next, outline your goal for your admission form- will it be for prescreening applicants, researching their background, etc?

Step 2: Choose the Right Platform

• Form Type: Once, you have determined what you want to achieve with the form, the next step is to choose how you want to collect the information. For example, you can print physical copies or add the form to your school website. If you’re a global university seeking international students, the right form would be digital so it can be accessed anywhere.
• Form builder: Next, choose your form-building tool. There are many options to choose from but having a simple yet efficient admission form is all you need. This takes out the stress of creating your fields from scratch, it’s also easy to navigate for the admissions office. You can integrate your form with your CRM tool so admissions can track applicants and reach out if needed.

Step 3: Draft the Form

• Organize Form Sections: Add questions to your form. If you are using a pre-built, just add new questions or edit a few questions, and you are done. Also, group related questions together so applicants have a seamless experience filling out the form.
• Include instructions and guidelines for each section: Provide clear instructions to guide applicants through the form. For example, you can add help and placeholder texts to guide applicants on how to answer questions. You can also indicate file upload limits or specific formatting requirements for essay submissions and other files.

Step 4: The Review and Test

• Proofread: Before publishing the form on your website,  ensure that the form includes all necessary fields and that the questions are phrased correctly. You can use grammar tools like Grammarly, Prowriting Aid, Hemingway, etc.
• Test the form with a sample group: You don’t have the luxury of one or two bad experiences as an institution; you should always provide the best. So, pilot-test your form with a small group before going live with it. Testing the form will help you identify any potential issues with the form and correct it before launching it.

Step 5: Launch and Collect Responses

• Distribute form to prospective students: Promote the admission form through your university’s website, social media channels, and other relevant platforms.
• Monitor responses and address any issues promptly: Keep track of the number of submissions and address any questions or concerns from applicants promptly. This will help create a positive applicant experience

Free Template for University Admission Form

Rather than going through the stressing of drafting your admission form from scratch, you can simply use the Formplus university admission template.  It already has all necessary fields to collect the information you need from prospective students and help determine if they are a great fit for your institution.

The template is also flexible, you can personalize the template to include more questions or use logic to personalize the applicant’s experience. For example, if a student is not an international student, they won’t see the language proficiency question but if they are, they will.

Conclusion

University admission forms help you create a smooth experience for applicants and your admissions office. It’s easy for applicants to understand the form, and admissions has all the information they need to choose students. It also creates an objective and unbiased standard for evaluating student’s fit for the program they are applying for.

We hope this guide helps you create a more seamless experience for your university admissions, and here’s a template to get you started.