How to Fill Out and Submit a Dean’s Certification Form

To fill out a Dean’s Certification Form, complete the applicant sections with information that matches your enrollment records exactly, sign the FERPA waiver that authorizes release of your disciplinary history, and submit the form to the Dean of Students office at your former school so a university official can complete the institutional portion and send it directly to the organization that requested it. Your part is short. Getting it right the first time is what saves you weeks.

Start With the Right Form

The form almost always comes from the organization asking for it, not from your old school. A law school includes it in its application packet, a bar association sends it with character and fitness materials, and a medical school supplies it through its secondary application.¹

One point of confusion for law applicants: Dean’s Certifications are not processed through LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service. You handle them separately from your CAS report.²

Some undergraduate institutions use their own standard form that receiving schools accept in place of the version they sent you. Hunter College, for example, uses a single standard form that law schools accept instead of their individual versions.³ Before you start filling anything out, check with your former school’s Dean of Students office to confirm which form they want.

What to Put in the Applicant Section

The form is split into sections you complete and sections the university completes. Your fields are straightforward, but inaccurate information here is the leading cause of processing delays, so match your old records rather than typing what feels natural now.

You will typically provide:

Full legal name as it appears in the school’s records. If your name has changed since you were enrolled, include both the current name and the name on file.
Student ID number. Some forms also ask for a Social Security number, though this is less common now.
Dates of attendance — the term you started and the term you graduated or withdrew.
Degree and graduation date. If you left without graduating, give the date of your last enrollment.
Recipient information: the name, address, and sometimes email of the institution or organization that will receive the completed form.

Medical school applicants may have to do more in the student section. If you answered “yes” to an institutional-action question on AMCAS or a secondary application, the form may ask you to write a statement describing the exact nature of the violation, the circumstances surrounding it, and any corrective measures taken.⁴

Sign the FERPA Waiver

Every Dean’s Certification form contains a privacy release, and your signature on it is what makes the whole process legal. Under FERPA, your former school must have your signed, dated, written consent before disclosing personally identifiable information from your education records to a third party.⁵ Disciplinary records fall squarely within that protection. Without your signature, the school will not complete the form.

The consent must specify which records can be disclosed, the purpose of the disclosure, and who will receive the information.⁵ Most certification forms build all three into the waiver language, so signing it in the right place covers the requirement. Electronic signatures are permitted as long as they identify and authenticate you as the signer.

Directory information such as your name, dates of attendance, and degree earned can generally be released without consent.⁶ The disciplinary record is the piece the waiver unlocks, and the certification exists primarily to disclose it, so skipping the signature stops everything.

Send It to the Right Office

Once your sections are complete and signed, send the form to the Dean of Students office or the student conduct office at your former institution. Some schools split academic questions and conduct questions between the Registrar and a separate conduct office, so check the school’s website for the correct destination.⁷ Sending it to the wrong office is one of the most common reasons certifications get stuck.

Submission methods vary. Some schools accept uploads through an online request form, others take emailed PDF attachments, and a few still want a mailed hard copy. If you attended more than one college, you need a separate certification from each one, each submitted through that school’s own intake process.

Fees are low or nothing. UCLA charges $5 per certification sent.⁸ Rice charges nothing.⁹ Expect zero to around five dollars at most schools, usually billed to your student account.

What the School Does Next

After the school receives your request, a conduct officer or dean reviews your student file and completes the institutional portion. The form confirms whether you were ever found responsible for a conduct violation, placed on academic probation, suspended, or expelled. A clean record is stated as such. If there is a disciplinary history, the school describes the violation and outcome, and some institutions attach a separate explanatory letter covering sanctions and relevant policy.⁷

The completed document goes from the school directly to the requesting organization. You do not touch it after you submit your request, which is the whole point: the receiver needs to know the document was not altered in transit. Many schools notify you once the certification has been sent.

Processing time depends on the school. Stanford’s office quotes up to 10 business days.⁷ George Washington University estimates 4 business days for routine requests, with longer waits during the first weeks of a semester and after spring commencement.¹⁰ Plan on roughly one to two weeks, and submit well before any application deadline. Peak periods — late fall for law schools, spring for bar admission — need extra cushion.

Mistakes That Slow Everything Down

UCI’s conduct office names the three issues that most often delay requests: incomplete or inaccurate information on the form, missing documents, and pending conduct matters that have not been resolved.¹ That last one surprises people. If you have an open conduct case, the school will not complete your certification until there is a final outcome.

The other usual culprits are routing the form to the wrong office, using a name that does not match your enrollment records, and forgetting to sign the FERPA waiver. A five-minute review of every field before you hit send prevents a two-week delay later.

If You Have a Disciplinary Record

A past finding of responsibility does not automatically sink your application. Concealing one often does. The entire point of the Dean’s Certification is to let the receiving institution compare what the school reports against what you wrote on your application, and inconsistencies are treated as a character issue in their own right.¹¹ Tufts’ conduct office puts it plainly: failure to disclose can bring severe consequences in admissions and, for law applicants, later in bar admission.¹²

Disclose first, then let the certification confirm it. Law school applications generally allow a character and fitness addendum where you explain what happened, take responsibility, and describe what you learned. The addendum should read as a genuine explanation rather than an excuse.¹³ Medical school forms sometimes build this statement into the certification itself.⁴

If disciplinary action is taken against you after your applications are already in, you are expected to update every school or program you applied to with the new information.¹²

Check What the School Will Actually Report

Before you submit the request, it helps to know what your former school’s records still contain. Retention policies vary by institution and by sanction severity. UC Davis keeps suspension records for seven years after a case closes and dismissal records for 50 years, with lower-level conduct cases held for five years.¹⁴ The University of Chicago keeps discipline records for five years from the last incident, but suspension and expulsion records are retained permanently.¹⁵

Some schools let students petition to expunge a conduct record after a waiting period. Washington University in St. Louis considers expungement requests from students who have earned at least 90 academic units and whose case has been closed for at least two calendar years, but academic integrity violations, physical assault, sexual misconduct, and hazing are not eligible, and anyone suspended or expelled is excluded entirely. A later conduct violation reverses an expungement and permanently bars future requests.¹⁶

If your records have been purged under the retention schedule, the school simply reports that none exist. Do not assume a matter is gone just because years have passed. Call the Dean of Students office before you request the certification if you are unsure whether a prior incident still appears in your file. Knowing what the school will say lets you write an accurate disclosure on your application instead of being surprised by what the form reveals.

1
UCI Office of Academic Integrity & Student Conduct. Dean’s Certification
2
New York University. Dean’s Certification
3
Hunter College. Dean’s Letters or Certification Forms
4
Medical College of Wisconsin. Dean’s Certification Applicant Instructions
5
eCFR. 34 CFR 99.30 – Under What Conditions Is Prior Consent Required to Disclose Information
6
Student Privacy Policy Office. Directory Information
7
Stanford University. Certification Forms – Dean of Students
8
Office of the Dean of Students. Dean’s Certification
9
Rice University. Dean’s Certification
10
The George Washington University. Certifications
11
Wake Forest University School of Law. Student Handbook – Chapter 15 Bar Examination and Character and Fitness
12
Tufts University. Dean’s Certifications or Disciplinary/Academic History Requests
13
Ohio Northern University. How and When to Write a Law School Addendum
14
UC Davis Student Conduct and Integrity. Appendix A Record Retention Policy of Student Disciplinary Records
15
The University of Chicago. Record Maintenance – Student Manual
16
Washington University in St. Louis. Expungement Policy