Having a roommate assigned to you can be an awful experience. They like punk music. You like classical. They smoke. You don't. Utah State University is using imaging to reduce conflicts and promote harmony on campus. It's an amazing story.
Trying to match 1,500 freshmen with compatible roommates is a thankless task. No matter what you do, people are still unhappy. Or they were until Utah State University (Logan, UT 801-797-3731) automated the process with imaging.
This university with 28,000 students had been manually assigning apartments and roommates to each other since they opened in 1888. To reduce conflict they tried to match students with other students who had similar living habits and study skills.
"This was almost impossible," says Robert Dixon, the university's network systems specialist. "There are too many variables. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't meet all their requirements manually. We concentrated on important things like assigning them to the hall they wanted, not mixing smokers with non-smokers and matching music fans with each other. This is important. Students spend a lot of time in their room studying. Heavy metal fans do not appreciate country and western music."
To match students, 10 staff members sat around a big conference table with applications for each building. Single students are housed six to an apartment, two to a room, in one of 16 buildings. All the applications were put in a pile and manually sorted. The process was hit and miss. More than 30% of students changed rooms during the year.
"In 1993 we decided to update the process," says Dixon. "We knew imaging was the answer, but didn't know which system to buy. We sent out an RFP and received three responses that met our criteria.
"In 1994 we chose CBORD's (Ithaca, NY 607-257-2410) Housing Management System as the database because it was easy to expand. At only $40,000, it also represented good value. To capture information we picked Principia's (West Chester, PA 610-429-1359) Remark Office OMR ($250)."
Rather than just automating their manual system, Utah State University redesigned the housing application form with checkboxes. Students mark the apartment building they want to live in and select the six things they feel are important in a roommate. The computer does the rest.
"Checkboxes make it easy to capture information," says Dixon. "After the forms come in they're scanned on a Hewlett-Packard 2CX scanner with an automatic sheet feeder. The scans are captured by Remark and OMRed to define the data. I use a generic Pentium 166MHz computer with a 1 GB hard drive, 64 MB of RAM and a 21" NEC monitor. Everything runs under Windows 95.
"After the information is captured, it's uploaded to the CBORD housing management system which runs on an HP NetServer with 64MB of RAM and 8 GB of storage. "CBORD automatically assigns the students rooms and roommates. Each preference is given a weighting. Anything that's too hard for the computer to match can be done manually. The whole process takes a couple of days.
"This may not appear to be much of a saving over the old way, but it is. It's all automatic and can be done over the weekend when we're not working. We used to spend long nights around a conference table.
"Saving money was not our major concern. Our goal was matching students with compatible roommates. We've done this. Less than 5% of freshmen now swap rooms. Before it was more than 30%.
"Remark is wonderful. We had no problems getting it to work. It's so easy to use we've never called tech support. One reason we chose Remark is because it works with forms produced on a standard word processor. We design forms in WordPerfect, print them and OMR them. No design skills are needed."
Utah State University says Remark works so well they're now using it for other surveys relating to quality of life issues. They're planning to automate the check in/check out process with a form created from Remark. This will let them see instantly how their furniture holds up and when it needs to be replaced and if damage charges need to be assessed.
