As a designated school official (DSO), you are required to monitor any changes to an international student’s enrollment, name, address or course of study, and report the changes in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). 

 

To accomplish this, throughout the course of a school term, DSOs check their own school’s student information system for any updates. When there are changes, they must then log into SEVIS to report those changes to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. For schools with small international student populations, DSOs can often manually carry out these responsibilities in SEVIS. However, schools that enroll many international students need a more efficient process. This is when “batch processing” may become useful. 

 

At its simplest definition, batch processing is the use of third-party software or a database to identify and push changes from international student records in a school’s official academic database to SEVIS. 

 

To help DSOs carry out their reporting responsibilities, the software is configured to communicate with the school’s official database, as well as with SEVIS. At a set time each day, it is programmed to extract data from the school’s database for DSO review and push data changes to SEVIS. 

 

DSOs can also enter any SEVIS-specific information that is not in the school’s database (such as dependent or passport information) into the batch software.  

 

Batch software does not immediately push the changes to SEVIS. It adds each new change to a batch that continues to collect changes to report to SEVIS until a DSO closes the batch and uploads it to SEVIS. Schools can upload batches multiple times throughout a given day, but all uploaded batches are sent to SEVIS once a day at the pre-programmed time. 

 

To take advantage of batch processing, schools must first test their external system to ensure functionality with the SEVIS-batch interface. Once testing is complete, schools can then register for batch processing. Contact the Student and Exchange Visitor Program Response Center at 800-892-4829 or 703-603-3400 or SEVISHelpDesk@ice.dhs.gov to begin batch testing or learn more about the process.