As international student mobility continues to grow worldwide, many university and college admissions teams must tackle correspondingly large numbers of student applications. Sorting and properly evaluating these applications in a timely manner is a genuine concern, both for admissions staff and for the hopeful future students.

Technological innovation can streamline this challenging work by ensuring that every application received by an institution meets or exceeds an acceptable level of quality and completion. In fact, ApplyBoard’s application pre-screening process ensures only the strongest applications are submitted to an institution. Here’s how.

Strengthening the Sector

Throughout our Strengthening the Sector series, we’re exploring the many ways that ApplyBoard supports the international education sector. Here, we’ll focus on how ApplyBoard’s pre-screening technology helps to alleviate pressure on admissions staff.

Read the other articles in this series as they’re published (we’ll update the links):

• Recruitment Partner Vetting
• Ongoing Performance Monitoring
• Sector Training
• Document Authentication

ApplyBoard’s Pre-Screening Process

To ensure every application meets study program requirements, ApplyBoard pre-screens each one before submitting them to institutions. This process is powered by AI technology and guided by our Customer Experience (CX) team. Here’s how it works:

Application Submission

Students don’t need an account to search the ApplyBoard platform for institutions and study programs. However, to create an application, they must create an account and a student profile.

Once a student’s profile is filled out, including their student ID and grades, the platform checks their overall program eligibility. The platform will then restrict the student’s search results to programs they qualify for.

ApplyBoard has a dedicated CX Journey Team to collect, evaluate, and implement program requirement information. This team liaises with admissions offices to ensure ApplyBoard’s pre-screening requirements align with the institutions’ processes.

Candidate Evaluation

Once the student has completed their application, submitted all necessary documents, and paid the application fee, ApplyBoard runs a series of automated checks to ensure the student’s information is accurate, valid, and legible:

If an issue is detected during any of these processes, ApplyBoard’s CX Journey Team receives an alert. A CX team member then checks the application manually.

If they determine the issue is minor, they can ask for more information from the applicant. For more serious issues, like if they suspect an applicant or document is not bona fide, they can cancel the application.

Our Journey Team does additional manual reviews to ensure students meet the necessary admissions requirements. 

These steps include reviewing:

• Required pre-requisite courses
• Previous study and work experience
• Any study gaps
• Previous rejection cases for similar students
• Additional documents (as required)

If a CX Journey advisor determines that an applicant doesn’t meet the admissions requirements, they can cancel the application.

If a Journey advisor cancels an application, the application immediately goes to another Journey advisor to review and confirm. If this second advisor agrees with the decision, the recruitment partner and student are notified of the reason for cancellation. They may initiate a follow-up review, if desired.

The Results

As of June 2026, 24% of all applications which have been submitted on the ApplyBoard platform weren’t passed on to institutions. By pre-screening these applications, we help to ensure that college and university admissions teams are reviewing only strong applications. This reduces application turnaround time, which can maximize acceptance rates.

Careful pre-screening benefits future students as well: Applicants who use the ApplyBoard platform consistently achieve a study program acceptance rate that exceeds institutional averages. And, where institutional and advisor partners provide us with consistent updates, the acceptance rates are even higher.

Case Study: University of Manitoba

As a U15 institution and one of Canada’s top research universities, the University of Manitoba (UM) is in high demand among international students. When Canada’s profile as an education destination skyrocketed in the late 2010s, so did international student application volumes at UM. To help keep up with the demand, UM’s leadership turned to ApplyBoard.

Recognizing that every institution’s application process is different, ApplyBoard’s Commercial Partnerships team sat down with the admissions professionals at UM to understand their unique pain points. Together, they established a set of criteria against which to evaluate UM applicants.

Today, 40% to 45% of the applications that ApplyBoard vets for UM are not submitted due to ineligibility. 

This has freed up UM’s admissions team to focus on the strongest applications, drastically reducing their acquisition cost per student. Just as important, undergraduate UM applicants now get letters of acceptance (LOAs) back in as little as one week, maximizing the chance they’ll accept.

Building Our Global Student Advisor Network

As the needs of international students evolve, so do the requirements ApplyBoard sets for working with new international education advisors and recruiters. It’s critical that we find partners who can guide future students effectively and ethically through the application process. As such, our team rigorously vets new agencies and individuals before they can work with us. We’ll explain how the vetting process works in our next Strengthening the Sector article. 

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About the ApplyInsights Team

FOOTNOTES:

1. All data courtesy of ApplyBoard unless otherwise stated.