Comment by philipallstar
1 day ago
Thank you for sharing this.
It's astonishing that places like this will do almost anything rather than create a simple API to ingest data that could easily be pushed automatically.
1 day ago
Thank you for sharing this.
It's astonishing that places like this will do almost anything rather than create a simple API to ingest data that could easily be pushed automatically.
I imagine they would love to create a simple API for this, but the problem is convincing thousands of schools to use that API.
If all you can get are PDFs, attempting to automatically extract information from those PDFs is a reasonably decision to make. The challenge is doing it well enough to avoid these kind of show-stopper problems.
they're essentially an ATS SAAS for medical school, if they have enough schools or enough prestigious schools, they can ask for whatever they want and the applicant schools would oblige. cheeky way to make it happen overnight: give a slight advantage to transcripts that are submitted digitally- the conversion would be complete within months.
If you want to get sued, sure.
The trouble is getting people to use your API - in this case med schools, but it can be much, much worse (more and smaller organizations sending you data, and in some industries you have a legal obligation to accept it in any format they care to send).