TRANSCRIPT MANAGEMENT SERVICES
OCAS collects transcripts from students in support of their college application. Many students must collect an official hard-copy transcript from their school or board and forward it to OCAS for processing. Students in select boards will have the ability to order an official transcript online at ontariocolleges.ca while applying to college.
The electronic Transcript Management Service (eTMS) works by using a North American data exchange standard in education to produce and distribute transcripts and transcript requests electronically. The colleges we serve, and the universities we work cooperatively with through the Ontario Universities' Application Centre (OUAC), receive these requests electronically from OCAS and can then, in turn, fulfill the transcripts electronically.
The colleges and universities see many advantages from this service. Fraudulent documents pose a big problem to post-secondary institutions everywhere. eTMS, by taking the documents out of the hands of applicants, eliminates the potential for fraud. OCAS electronically forwards transcripts to their ultimate destinations without the applicant ever being able to touch them. An additional service benefit to the colleges is that OCAS collects and remits any applicable transcript fees.
Recently, OCAS has turned its attention to expanding the eTMS service to applicants seeking transcripts from secondary schools or boards. A pilot project was successfully run in conjunction with a group of school boards, and the results indicated that this is an initiative worth pursuing. Eventually OCAS hopes to offer the benefits of an electronic transcript request service to anyone needing a transcript for admission purposes.
One of the newer services we have introduced is the ability for applicants to request, via the web, that their Ontario college or university transcripts be sent from one institution to another. For the applicant, there are many advantages to this service: the need to fill out multiple requests is eliminated; the system is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; travel to their college or university is unnecessary; and the fulfillment time can be greatly reduced compared to the old transcript request system.
