With students now mandated to also enroll in the College Board's website, it is critical for AP coordinators to be able to identify students who have not enrolled in the College Board but only registered in Total Registration and vice versa. Coordinators should reconcile student information between the two systems before the AP exam ordering deadline in November to verify students have paid the appropriate fees and to avoid the $40 per exam late fee the College Board will charge for late ordering.
Coordinators will find the link to the Reconcile Students Between TR and CB tool in the Utilities for CB Enrollment area of the AP Report Center.
We recently did a webinar on the Reconciliation Utility, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDsCbczm5VY
The first step is to download a file (Student Roster as seen at https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-coordinators-manual-part-1-2019-20.pdf#page=76) from the College Board’s website. You can go to AP Report Center => Exams => Utilities for CB Enrollment => Reconcile Students Between TR and CB and choose to either upload your Student Roster from your College Board account or load the data from a previously uploaded Student Roster.
Once you upload the College Board's file and map the column headers, you will see discrepancies noted in five categories. You can click the student in a category to make any needed corrections within Total Registration.
The five subsets (areas) you may see in your Reconcile report include:
- Student Info Potentially Matches - These are students matched between TR and CB based on name and/or email address and/or Student ID number. Some students may not match due to a simple name difference such as using Mike as the first name in one system and Michael in the other system. Or the student may have incorrectly entered their Student ID number differently in one system.
- Student is in TR but not CB - The students in this subset are identified as students registered for AP exams in Total Registration but do not match students in the College Board file the coordinator uploaded into the Reconcile tool. That means the student's first and last name and/or email address did not match data in the College Board's file. Many of these students will use a shortened version of their first name or nickname in one system but the full name in the other system (Mike vs Michael). The coordinator can easily edit the student's name in Total Registration if needed (see Editing Student's Information).
- Student is in CB but not TR - The students in this subset are identified as students enrolled for AP exams in the College Board's system but do not match students in Total Registration. That means the student's first and last name and/or email address used in CB did not match a current registration in TR. You may see exams listed with UD, which means the student did not choose they will take the exam in the College Board's system.
- Student with Matched Student Info between CB File and TR Data - Students have auto-matched between the two systems because their first name, last name, email address, and exams matched in both systems or they are students the coordinator manually matched in the Potential Matches table. Another reason students may show in this subset is if a student registered in TR with two different accounts and one account was cancelled. In this case, it is likely the now cancelled account is linked to the CB record in this report, and you should unmatch the records and then run the report again.
- Students with Matched Student Info, Exams and Fee Status - These students have fully matched between TR and CB and should be considered reconciled.