I know that ultimately this is a question to ask the schools but I’m hoping for a quick general answer to cure my general curiousity. I’ll be meeting with an advisor at a later date.
Once upon a time, I went to College A and started out doing okay but eventually did not so well and dropped out some time later. My grades over the years went from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s.
Flash forward ten years and I’m back in a different school taking classes and have a 4.0 GPA after taking 25 credit hours of part time classes. I’d like to try to transfer over some core classes from College A (why take them twice?) but also preserve my newly earned academic excellence as much as possible. Can you generally pick and chose what to transfer? Could I simply attempt to transfer over a select number of old A’s and B’s (assuming they can be transfered) and write off my poor performances to the past? Or is it more of a mass merger? Speaking of, and again I know I need to talk to an advisor but I’m asking in generalities, is there typically a ‘statue of limitations’ on earned credits before they can’t be transfered?
Your new school will not take all of your credits, and generally speaking, you’ll want to take the classes you did poorly in again anyway. It’s not going to be an all or nothing transfer (unless you’ve earned a specific transfer degree from a community or junior college).
My schools (all four) required me to declare all of my previous collegiate courses and, had I not divulged that informatin, I would have been subject to dismissal. The over-all GPA used for honors, though, was based on the courses taken only at each particular institution.
Drat. Not only were honors based on the GPA earned at the particular insitute attended at the time, but also the running GPA was figured only on the courses at that institute.
Monty, I’m assuming that “declare” is different from “transfer,” right? The programs I teach in require students to provide transcripts for all post-high school courses with their admissions materials, but do not require the student to transfer any of the credits. GPA calculations don’t include courses that aren’t transferred.
Yes, as long as the courses you are transferring meet your new school’s requirements as to content/appropriateness for your present degree program requirements and grade (usually has to be an A, B or C for undergrad degree programs), they can be transferred…just the ones you want to transfer.
And in the schools I attended, and taught at, they did not count towards your GPA; just the courses you take at the new institution.
In Florida, at least, the courses and GPA from my Junior College AA degree did not count towards my GPA at the senior-level university I attended, just the courses I actually took there.
(In grad school, normally the minimum grade for a course to be transferrable is a B)
I guess I fell into a lucky batch of schools. They automatically took in transfer all transferable credits. Well, they accidentally (and this one was kind of funny) didn’t take for credit the course they agreed to use as my qualifying course to enter the Linguistics program.
My reading of the OP didn’t give that much information about the current problem the OP’s facing. So, Jophiel, did you already provide the transcripts to the school? If you did, what’s their problem? Why can’t they figure out what credits you’ve already taken?
For that last question in my case, I did have to provide to my last school a course description from the previous school’s catalog and a letter from the instructor for another school’s course.
Sometimes they can’t. But generally speaking, when the schools get your transcripts, (if any), they will see that school C, which you had to have transcripts to enter, have records of the prior school which qualified you to enroll in school C, hence records from school B
And so on, from school B to school A.
This does not apply if one is entering school A with no previous history, of course.
…but even then, I just have to wonder…if you claim you are coming into college 5 or 10 or 2 years later…they’re gonna want your high school transcripts, and I think that they just might show that your records were transmitted to College A.
You explain it; it could certainly happen, though, as you described, I just don’t think it is too likely.
Nothing like that. I was taking a graphic design program a decade ago at a downstate school and eventually dropped out (as detailed above). Lately I’ve taken some history courses at a local college on a part time basis which doesn’t require declaring a major or seeing an advisor until you go full time so I haven’t done so yet.
I’ve decided that I’d like to continue along this path and (slowly) try to earn a degree and, towards that end, transfer in any core classes like English and Econ 101 and stuff so I’m not paying for them twice. Obviously, I wouldn’t be transfering Printmaking 305 anyway. I generally did well in my core classes; it was my later classes where things fell off.
I’m going to see an advisor soon this semester (I’ll have to to plan a degree path anyway) and will get the official answers but I was wondering about it regardless.
College admissions counselor (specializing in transfer students) checking in.
Most any accredited four-year college/university will require prospective students to submit transcripts from all previous colleges attended. Here, we frequently see people in the OP’s position - early college experience marked by poor grades, followed by a period of years out of school, leading to a return to school, whereupon grades show a marked improvement. Most moderately selective schools, especially smaller schools where an admissions person reviews your application personally, will lend much more weight to your more recent course work/grades when making the admissions decision. Personally, I can say that our school finds students in this position to generally be very productive upon transferring to our place, and we welcome their addition to the student body.
Schools have different policies regarding the transferring of grade point averages. Here, we compute a cumulative GPA of all previous course work to determine admissibility, but that number does not figure into the student GPA accumulated here. A college down the street, however, does figure in that previous GPA w the work done at that institution. An admissions person at the school you are considering would be able to tell you their policy.
If you apply for financial aid via the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), any college that you attended previously and were given financial aid will show up in your aid paperwork. At many schools (here included), that newly discovered coursework, especially if it harbors poor grades, is grounds to have the acceptance pulled on grounds of academic dishonesty.
BTW, I work at a small private university in the St. Louis suburbs.