Nursing CAS

WellRNyouspecial · May 2

This is about half rant half genuine curiosity. I'm applying to an FNP program using the AACN's nursing CAS application portal and have hit quite a few roadblocks. To be fair to the organization, they've responded promptly to the issues I've encountered, but my real issue is that I fail to understand what service this organization is providing to either schools or applicants as a third-party intermediary that couldn't be better serviced by a direct application to the school itself

Apart from the site itself being somewhat difficult to navigate with a few redundancies (I.e. why am I entering achievements, experiences, and licensures in 3 separate fields for a graduate program that will also require a CV and a personal statement?) my real gripe is with the transcript entry and verification process.

My personal experience, and I don't believe this to be an isolated incident, involved submitting official transcripts to the application portal, paying for those transcripts to be entered professionally, and having the only prerequisite my school required (statistics) omitted from the coursework along with 3 other courses I took at this school.

I realize mistakes happen, but this felt almost...intentional? If the business model of the organization relies upon repeated cycles of transcript entry and application fees for students mandated to use if for admission to schools using the CAS service then obviously it's to their benefit to ensure the student doesn't meet one or more requirements. A cursory web search of the phrase "CAS problems" yields a lot of similar stories so I guess I am in fact insinuating that they do this intentionally.

If the accuracy of the transcripts was of great importance to an academic institution, why rely on a 3rd party to enter the information; all this would seem to accomplish is to subject an otherwise simple process to transcription errors? And please don't insinuate that they have a proprietary formula for calculating overall GPA and that's the value added. I'm not a brain surgeon but this is pretty simple math.

Anyone on the academics side have any insight into what benefit the school might get from this service? Because speaking as an applicant, I think I can safely say there's very little on our side.