As you may know, UNE provides graduation documentation to its students digitally via myeQuals. AHEGS and testamur are issued free of charge to all graduating students, with academic transcripts available for a $20 fee, carried over from the previous paper-based pricing model. However, many employers do not accept AHEGS as sole proof of qualifications, requiring graduating students to apply for an academic transcript at their own cost. This isn’t a great experience for students, adding additional time and cost burden to the final stages of their UNE journey, and manually issuing transcripts generates significant workload for staff – DigEd handle approximately 6000 transcript requests each year, 31% of which are from graduating students.
To create a much better experience for students and staff, and bring UNE into line with sector practice, DigEd have recently initiated a new model for UNE that automates transcript provision and issues transcripts free of charge to all graduating students*. This is a two-phase process, with transcripts on conferral now able to be automatically issued to students – 1410 free transcripts have now been issued following last week’s graduation ceremonies. Following technical development work to be completed in Callista early in the new year, we will be able to issue transcripts automatically when a student’s course status is set to ‘complete’ – we expect to have this in place for the autumn 2024 graduation round. Through this initiative, we also anticipate being able to include WAM (weighted average mark) on transcripts, providing additional value for students and eliminating the current manual calculation process.
We are looking forward to this great improvement to student and staff experience – watch this space for updates on the progress of the second phase.
*Note that transcripts will still be available on ad hoc request for a fee, for all past students and other use cases