So you never check for specific courses? I have to do that to hire teachers. (Certain amount of units in this and that, etc.)
I like the way you think. So much talent is available an HR departments or hiring managers get bogged down by concerns about age, weight, degree or level of training.
Yo people, Steve Jobs never finished college. Bill Gates only holds an honorary degree. Graduating from college proves you can stick to a program. It doesn’t prove other abilities.
This starts to get at the issue - the degree and coursework also come into play when you’re trying to hire somebody who can qualify for licensing as a professional engineer. For somebody with an engineering degree from an American school, the check is likely nothing more than a cursory “did (s)he really graduate?” For a foreign applicant, or somebody with a degree not specifically titled “engineering,” the licensing requirements can be more complicated.
If an employer doesn’t care about licensing, they may or may not check, but I suspect they wouldn’t put much time into it either way.
I’m puzzled at that question. A transcript (at least any one I’ve heard of) is a formal document issued by the school/college/university you attended and lists all the courses you’ve taken and grades you got (unless you were able to transfer some credits from another institution). So, I’m not sure what you are getting at when you ask “do they check every subjects in the transcript that you take in that school…”. If they ask for a transcript then every subject is right there in front of them. Some may be irrelevant to the job - is that what you are getting at?
I did show a transcript for an internship while in school. After graduation, I worked for a few different companies as a software developer. One of the companies did ask for a GPA, but didn’t ask for a transcript. Once you have several years of experience, your GPA and your specific course load, general ed classes, or electives (e.g. whether or not as a Computer Science major you took Organic Chemistry Chem 305 or stopped with University Chemistry II Chem 250), doesn’t matter as long as you know your field, unless you want to raise the fact that you took some fancy neato course. In my field, nobody cares about your high school or how good or poorly you did. The fact that you got in to college and made it through is proof enough of your academic ability.
From your post, I’m guessing (hope!) you’re not a native English speaker, so what country are you in, and/or what country (if any) are you planning on getting a job? That will affect the answer drastically, I should think.
Depends on your country; before this thread [I’m in the UK] I’d never even heard of a “school transcript” (is that just your qualifications, or something else?) and certainly never heard of any employer asking to see any kind of school records other than my qualifications.
I agree with this, I graduated college in 1984 and my degree is something I never used for any job I’ve had. I think I’d have to jump through hoops to get the transcripts, 'cause the one time I wanted them, I had forgot my number. Back then we did not use a social security number for school.
Governement jobs seem to check more than an average industry job. But even then your degree can become worthless fast. Suppose you did have a degree in computers even ten years ago, the world of information techonology moves so fast most of what you learned is out dated.
I worked at a computer store over Christmas and the sole reason they required A+ certification was that it was easier to weed through the hundreds of applications they got. Oddly enough a lot of the A+ certifications were from high school seniors.
I have only had to furnish copies of my undergraduate and graduate school diplomas at Global 100 companies.
I wasn’t hiring teachers, I was hiring engineers. Four years of experience doing applicable work mattered more to me than four years of college. It’s also pretty easy to find out whether someone’s bluffing if you do a good technical interview. If I was satisfied after I finished quizzing them and making them solve problems, I would have them do a group interview with four of my lead guys. If you could survive that, I didn’t care whether you took “Introduction to Engineering Principles” ten years ago.
no i mean do they check at the schools if you really finished that subject in that time? im from mexico =)
That information would be in your transcript (at least, it’d be in a transcript from a U.S. school; I’m not sure if there’s any difference in what’d be on a transcript from a Mexican school). The transcript would typically contain which classes you took during each school session, and your grades in those classes.
Since the transcript is an official document from the school, I can’t picture a situation in which an employer would further contact a school (after reading the transcript) for additional verification, unless the employer had some reason to believe that the transcript might somehow have been falsified.
Interesting. What do you folk call a formal statement of courses you’ve taken, with credits and grades obtained, from a school (high school, college, or university) that you attended?
When I graduated, a transcript was done on a mainframe line printer using a commerically printed carbon form; so forging that would mean you were a pretty clever artist. The form listed the courses I took at 4 years of university and dates and the marks; So it’s not just a matter of saying “I have an ******* degree”. Usually this included a permission slip to allow them to verify the authenticity with the university or request their own copy direct from the university.
As mentioned, the most recent degree is usually the only relevant one, unless it’s a weird job - combination rocket scientist and brain surgeon. If the university accepted you and you passed the courses to qualify for the degree, then you must be passably qualified.
What do employers do about foreign qualifications? Not sure. Usually the hiring process includes an interview, often one with the technical people where it’s hard to BS about what you actually know. IF it raises any red flags, they may dig deeper, particularly if you are new to the country and there’s no previous employer to check your work record against. Or, safer to just pick someone who has verifiable qualifications and work experience.
Ermmm… I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a list (maybe I had one, but it was 20 years ago). I have a collection of GCSE and A-Level certificates which I could produce if needed, but I can’t imagine anyone caring what GSCEs I got 20 years ago.
Then again, I’ve no idea where those certificates are. I assume my parents kept 'em.
I think the problem you’re having is the difference in how North American and British course work is evaluated. In the U.S. (and, I think, in Canada) each term (semester or quarter) at secondary school or university you take a number (usually four to six) of courses. There is more or less a standard assumption of what topics are covered in a course of any given name. Each course is finishes with a test given by the instructor for that course. There are never any tests on national scale or tests over a student’s entire course work over all their secondary school or university training. (Yeah, there are the SAT, ACT, and GRE tests, but they don’t serve for course grades, and they are tests of general academic preparation, not of specific course work.)
At most secondary schools or universities the possible grades for a course are (from best to worst) A, B, C, D, and F. Yes, there are some variants on this (including the one at my undergraduate school, where all courses were just S or U). In general, you are given a grade point average for your entire work at the secondary school or university by averaging all your grades (letting A, B, C, D, and F equal 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0 points, respectively). There is usually a requirement of a minimum grade point average to graduate. In secondary school there will also be a requirement of some certain necessary courses and some certain number of courses to graduate. In university there will usually be a requirement of some courses for everyone, some certain number of courses, and a list of required course for your major to graduate.
The transcript for a secondary school or a university education in North America consists of a list of all the courses taken, the term when they were taken, the grade for that specific course, the grade point average, and the degree and major granted by the secondary school or university. Anyone looking at the transcript knows what courses the student took and what grades the student got. In some cases, a recruiter looking at an applicant for a job might care for nothing except the fact that the person graduated from a given university with a given major, since he might consider that anyone who graduated from there with that major had to have taken sufficiently difficult courses to graduate.
No.
And you have to carefully consider employment at a company that can or will waste resources on such nonsense instead of evaluating your actual ability to produce. Unless your transcript contains references to specific background necessary for the job, they would be wasting their time, and still learning nothing about your ability to perform.
It really depends; the first few years I was in the job market, nobody even asked for my transcript or any proof I attended college. And then, recently, I applied for a job where they wanted to know ALL colleges I had attended, and how many hours I had at each one, and I had to obtain transcripts (I have my transcript from graduate school, but for this one, that wasn’t enough). This was a federal job. Which, after submitting the application, I never heard from again.
I think when I applied for a state job I had to bring in a copy of my transcript, but I just did the grad school one and that was enough–I was ten years out of college at that point and had to be one of the top three scorers on a test, before I got to that point, so I don’t think the grades were relevant, just the fact that the transcript proved I hadn’t lied.
However, I majored in journalism, and the graduate degree’s in comparative literature. I’ll bet it would be different if I’d gone to law school or medical school, or maybe even had a degree in engineering. I have friends who went to nursing school, and they are always asked for their transcripts, even after years in the profession.
Generally speaking, no. However, I have had an employer call the college to verify the meaning of a couple of codes that appeared on my transcript that weren’t explained; they just wanted to make sure that I did, in fact, receive credit for the courses. No big deal.