Request States

Every request in Paperless carries up to three independent states that describe where the request stands from three perspectives:

• The student state describes what the student sees.
• The staff state describes where processing is on the side of the examination board or the Registrar’s Office.
• The ZPA state exists only for requests that go through the central examination office — see Handing Over to the ZPA.

The states are shown as labels in the right pane of the request page. Each label has a past-tense phrase that describes the last change, for example Was received or Decision is signed.

Student State

These states are visible to the student.

State	Meaning
Was received	The student has submitted the request.
Decision is available	A decision has been published and the student can download it.
Decision was delivered	The student has opened and downloaded the decision.
Was rejected	The request was rejected.
Is complete	Processing is finished.

In addition, a student can see a ZPA status when the central examination office has recorded the decision in RWTHonline.

Staff State

These states describe the processing on the staff side.

State	Meaning
Was created	Staff created the request for a student who has not accepted it yet — see Creating a Request for a Student.
Was received	The request has been submitted and is ready for processing.
Discuss in PA	The request should be discussed in the examination board (PA).
Waiting for reply	The request is waiting for a reply from the student or a third party.
Decision (draft) ready to sign	A decision has been drafted and is waiting for the signature.
Decision is signed	The decision is signed and can be published.
Is complete	Processing is finished.

ZPA State

State	Meaning
Was created	The ZPA created the request for a person — a rare case.
Was received	The request was submitted to the ZPA — either by the person themselves or by your office after the decision was signed.
Decision was recorded	The ZPA entered the decision into RWTHonline.
Is complete	Processing at the ZPA is finished.

Decision States

A decision has its own state that is separate from the request states:

• Drafted — the decision text exists as a PDF, but it does not have a printed signature and no digital certificate yet.
• Signed — the decision carries the printed signature and the digital signature.

Creating a decision or signing it updates the staff state automatically: drafting a decision sets Decision (draft) ready to sign, signing it sets Decision is signed.

Changing a State

Next to each state label you can use the Set state to… dropdown to move the request to another state. Which states you can change depends on your role and permissions — if a state is not editable for you, the dropdown is not available and the message You cannot change the … status. explains why. You can also reset a state back to No status yet where this is allowed.