VirtualEvals

Access for Sending Schools–Registration information

Please see the Registration for Sending Schools link to the right.

Access for Receiving Schools

Receiving schools, i.e., health professions schools/programs, do not need to register through NAAHP to use VirtualEvals.

If you used VirtualEvals for the 2007 cycle, you can access VirtualEvals using the same login you used last year. However, we do require that you set up a new password. Log into VirtualEvals using your login from the 2007 cycle and use the password retrieval link to activate your account for the 2008 cycle. If someone in your office is new to VirtualEvals and needs to set up a user account s/he will need the authorization code. If you have not received that code from us through US mail, please email help@virtualevals.org. We will provide the authorization code in a phone call to the appropriate person at your institution.

If your institution is interested in receiving letters through VirtualEvals but has not yet been in touch with VirtualEvals about the process, please contact help@virtualevals.org.

User Fee and Other Costs

There are costs to develop and maintain a web-based system such as VirtualEvals; thus, it is necessary to charge a fee for using the system. Early on it was decided that VirtualEvals will be offered as an optional service to NAAHP members and that sending schools would be charged a reasonable fee to use the system.

There is NO fee for the health professions schools/programs to use VirtualEvals.

Our goal has been for VirtualEvals to be more cost efficient than conventional means of transmitting letters of evaluation and to keep the user fee reasonable while covering the cost of development and maintenance. Initially, we asked pilot schools from the 2005 application cycle to estimate the cost of sending the letters conventionally. The average was $23 per applicant. For the 2006 application cycle, the user fee for VirtualEvals was structured as follows: a $100 access fee per undergraduate institution/program was required to gain access to the system. Each applicant record was then $10, regardless of the number of schools to which the applicant was applying.

The same fee structure and payment arrangements were in place for the 2007 application cycle and will be in place for the 2008 cycle. Thus, there is an access fee of $100 and a fee of $10 per applicant record.

Sending institutions register through the NAAHP web site and payment is made to NAAHP. Payment may be made by credit card (institutional or personal) or check (institutional or personal). See the link at the right for detailed information.

There are two other potential “in house” costs to an advisor using VirtualEvals. If you send letters from a number of evaluators for each applicant, you will need the ability to convert letters for each applicant into a single PDF. Most advisors do this by using a scanner and software that allows you to save scanned documents in PDF, such as Adobe Acrobat Standard. This is a software program that allows you to create PDF’s from scanned documents. It costs about $100 and should not be confused with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Some scanners have software built in that will convert documents to PDF.

If you do not have access to a scanner and will be purchasing one, see the FAQ’s on this site for recommendations based on the experience of senders in the past. We have been using the HP Scanjet 7650 and have found it reliable and easy to use.

If you send only a single composite letter, you can save that letter in a PDF format without having to scan. Or if other letters come to you electronically (for example as a Word document), you can convert them to PDF. But keep in mind, each applicant’s letters should be contained in a single PDF and posted as a single PDF.

Because VirtualEvals is a web-based system, there is no VirtualEvals software to purchase.