LITTLE ROCK — University of Central Arkansas students applying for lottery scholarships ran into problems this month - more than 200 of their transcripts weren’t received for a while by the state Department of Higher Education.
The problem, now corrected, resulted from a computer issue, said Tara Smith, financial-aid coordinator at the department.
She said that from Sept. 2 to Sept. 15, her agency didn’t get 238 transcripts from UCA students applying for scholarships.
“The issue has been resolved,” Smith said. “It won’taffect anybody’s eligibility.”
A parent of a UCA student contacted the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the problem last week. His son had been rejected for an Academic Challenge Scholarship, which is mostly funded by lottery proceeds.
The parent didn’t understand why, because his son filled out all the forms correctly.
But the department told him that the application was incomplete because there was no transcript.
The parent said UCA told his son that the transcript had been sent to the state agency. The student had retained the confirmation e-mail.
After the parent visited the department Friday, his son was approved for a scholarship. At that point, UCA had gotten the transcripts to the agency.
Higher Education spokesman Brandi Hinkle said the agency uses a department at the University of Texas to transmit college transcripts electronically.
The Texas department recently changed computer servers, but UCA hadn’t switched to the codings needed with the new server, Hinkle said.
Lee Stevens, associate director of Information Technology at UCA, said UCA “failed to update our system. As soon as we were made aware of the problem, we diagnosed the problem and corrected it.”
Arkansas, Pages 8 on 09/23/2010