Terra Dotta has developed a stock report to help facilitate international offices that manage ‘buddy programs' designed to match international and domestic students based on similar interests and majors to help ease the transition of international students to college life, enrich the cross-cultural competency and international perspective of U.S. students, and most importantly, create lasting friendships. This article describes how this stock report will operate on your site.

Permissions

Self-service stock reports can be accessed from the 'My Queries and Reports' panel of the Admin Home Page. Click the 'Stock Reports' file icon for an expanded list of any reports installed. A 'Browse TDCL' button appears, allowing clients to browse and import stock reports independently. Once installed, the Buddy Matching report will be available in the 'Stock Reports' section and accessible by administrators with the following permissions:

• Applicant Admin: Stock Reports

• Application Admin: Application admin: questionnaires (view)

• Profile Admin: Profile: user information (view)

Process Overview

The process of setting up and using the buddy matching utility has a few steps:

1. If necessary, create the applicant parameter for visa type.
2. Create a program to which both international and domestic student will apply (Ex. TDU’s Global Friends).
3. Create (or install and edit compatibility questionnaire from the TDCL) and assign it to your 'Global Friends' program.
4. Collect data from the domestic and international student in the program.
5. Run the stock report to see a list of potential matches.

Configuration of Required and Optional Data Fields: Visa Type Applicant Parameter

All participants (domestic and international) will be applying to the same program and application cycle. The stock report will determine which are domestic and which are international based on whether or not they have a value for the parameter you indicate is being used for storing visa type.

If the student has any value for this parameter, the student is treated as an international student. The stock report will only be looking to see if the student has any value indicated in the parameter. Students with no value for this parameter are assumed to be domestic students.

Matching questionnaire

The questionnaire you deploy to determine compatibility between the students can have as many questions/topics as you would like. However, only question items with the type ‘Rating’ will be used by the stock report. So while you can have additional multiple/single-select question items, they will not be used by the stock report.

It is recommended to use a 5-star rating system due to the way that the compatibility scores are generated, but a rating system with more stars will still work. It is not recommended to reduce it to 4 or lower.

Optional Matching Applicant Parameter

If you would like to match domestic and international students based on them having the same value for an applicant parameter, you will need to set up this applicant parameter if it doesn’t exist yet. An example of this is that if you wanted to only try to match domestic and international students that have the same major or department, you would need to have this as an applicant parameter that is populated for both student types.

Using the Stock Report

First, the applicants will have to fill out and submit the rating questionnaire you have built. It doesn’t matter in which phase the questionnaire is deployed, but the applications you are matching will all need to be in the same application cycle. You can use separate programs for domestic and international students, but both student populations will need to fill out the same questionnaire.

Once you’ve got the questionnaires submitted, an administrator will go to the Admin Home Page and click on the ‘Stock Reports’ folder link. This will expand the folder, and the report ‘Buddy Matching’ will appear in the list.

The form requires the admin to select the following:

• The applicant parameter being used to identify visa type
• The questionnaire with the rating questions to be used for matching
• The application cycle in which the program is taking place​

Optionally, the admin can select another applicant parameter that is used as an initial matching criteria. For example, if you only wanted to match students that have the same major, you would select major for the option ‘Optional: Matching by applicant parameter’.

Once run, the 'buddy matching' stock report will display a list of all the domestic students sorted by last name, and for each domestic student, it will list the top three international student matches. It determines the top three based on a compatibility score.

The compatibility scores are calculated by comparing the number of stars selected for each rating question item between the domestic and international students:

• If either student selected ‘n/a’, there is no change to the compatibility score.
• If both students selected the same number of stars, 5 points is added to the compatibility score.
• If the student responses are within one star, 3 points is added to the compatibility score.
• If the student responses are within two stars 1 point is added to the compatibility score.
• If the student responses are more than three stars apart, 2 points are subtracted from the compatibility score.

When determining the top three compatibility scores, only positive scores are considered. If the compatibility score is zero or negative, it is not considered as a potential top-3 match.

Below the table showing the best matches, there are two tables that will display the domestic and international students that did submit responses for the questionnaire but are not in the best matches table if there were any.

The best matches table will have a checkbox to the left of each international student name. This can be used to ‘mark’ a match for the domestic student. When this is done, the international student’s name will be dynamically changed with a strike through anywhere else in the table that the student is listed and the checkbox disabled.

There is also a button at the bottom of the table that will toggle on and off the display of any non-marked international student names. After the admin is done matching all the domestic and international students, this button can be clicked to make a more print-friendly table.