What Google Forms Costs a School at Admission Time

Where it is genuinely good

It is worth being fair about this first, because the case for moving does not rest on Google Forms being bad at forms. Google lists short answers, paragraphs, multiple choice, checkboxes, dropdowns, file uploads, scales, ratings, grids, dates and times among its question types. Answers can be checked against rules. A form can be shared as a link or embedded on a website, and responses can be linked to a Google Sheet.

If the only job is collecting answers, that is plenty. The rest of this article is about the jobs an admission form has that a survey does not.

Cost one: the document question asks parents to sign in

The question a school most wants answered on an admission application is the upload: a photograph of the B-Form, the birth certificate, last year's result card. Google's help page for file upload questions says: "To answer this question, responders need to sign in to a Google Account."

For a parent whose phone is already signed in, that may be a small step. For one who is not, or who is not sure which account the phone is using, it is a point where some of them will stop, and it stands in front of the one question you most needed answered.

Cost two: stopping duplicates means making everyone sign in

Parents enquire twice. They fill in the form on Monday, hear nothing by Wednesday, and fill it in again; or both parents fill it in separately. In a spreadsheet those arrive as two rows, and whether anybody connects them depends on who is reading.

The setting Google offers here is "Limit to 1 response", and its help page is clear about what it asks of every respondent: "To access and fill out the form, users must sign in to their Google Account." That moves the sign-in from the document question to the very first screen, for every parent who taps your advert. One response per Google Account is also not the same as one per family: on a form that asks about one child at a time, it would stop a parent enquiring about a second.

What an admission form needs is closer to the opposite: to notice the repeat and keep it. The second enquiry is often the more urgent one.

Cost three: the checks are regular expressions

A CNIC or B-Form number has a fixed shape: thirteen digits, usually written as five, seven and one, with dashes between them. Google Forms can check a short answer against a number, a piece of text, a length or a regular expression, which is enough to enforce that shape if somebody on the staff can write one.

If you are staying on Google Forms this season, this is the pattern to use. It accepts the number with or without its dashes, and checks only the shape of the number, not whether it is real: ^[0-9]{5}-?[0-9]{7}-?[0-9]$

The class question is harder. A dropdown's options are whatever somebody typed into it, so the list of classes has to be kept in step by hand with the classes and sections you are actually offering, and changed on the day one of them fills.

Cost four: responses are a list of people who finished

Google describes the Summary tab as the place where "you can find the list of people who responded to your form", and responses can be linked to a Google Sheet. For a survey, that is the list you want.

For an advert, it is half the picture. A response, by definition, is somebody who finished. To judge a campaign you also need the people who opened the form and left, and the people who started and gave up, because those two groups point at different problems: the first at the advert, the second at the form. Whatever tool you use, check that it can show you those numbers for each campaign link separately before you spend money sending people to it.

Cost five: everything after submit is done by hand

This is the largest cost and the least visible, because it arrives in small pieces across the whole season. Once the answers are in a sheet, the rest is a person at a desk: deciding who rings which parent, remembering who asked to be called back after the results, working out which advert brought which family, and finally typing each accepted child into the school's own system, field by field.

A spreadsheet can carry some of this. You can add a status column, an owner and a follow-up date, and plenty of well-run offices do. What it cannot do is remind anybody, notice that a row has been waiting four days, or stop two colleagues ringing the same family. The discipline lives in people, and admission season is exactly when people are busiest.

Cost six: whose account is it in?

Google's help page notes that for the form owner, "uploaded files are stored in a new folder on Google Drive". On an admission form, that means a season's worth of children's B-Forms and birth certificates sits in whichever account built the form.

Check whose account that is before the season starts. If it is a staff member's personal account, decide now what happens to those documents when that person leaves.

When Google Forms is still the right choice

If you take a handful of admissions a year, one person handles every enquiry, and nobody minds typing the accepted ones into the school system, a Google Form is fine, and moving would be effort for its own sake. Keep it for headcounts, staff surveys and one-off events either way.

The case for moving is volume and people. Once enquiries come from several campaigns, more than one person follows them up, or the retyping takes a clerk's whole week, the costs above stop being small. That is the point at which the admission form belongs in the same system as your students.

It is what Edflo's forms were built for. The class list comes from your school's own classes, the CNIC and B-Form question already knows the shape of the number, and parents upload documents without signing in to anything. A repeat enquiry is flagged against the parent's mobile number rather than turned away, each campaign link reports its own views, starts and submissions, and an accepted enquiry opens the enrolment form already filled in.