Credit Transfer Question

[alleycat]

Pardon the ignorance of a newbie... how are credits transfered from one institution to another? Are they compared apples-to-apples for classes or are they lumped together in LL and UL designations?

Honestly it all depends on the institution and what they will except. I have school take something like 2 classes and other schools take alot more. Some schools have a cap on the amount of credits transfered in. Some schools have articulation agreements were they take everything from the other institution. Many schools will not take credits from another school if it is going into the area of study ect ect. Honestly it just all depends on the school and the credits. Why are you looking to transfer credits to a certain school? Because if it's one of the Big 3 they pretty much take it all.

[cookderosa]

My question is not if they are accepted but how they are applied... if I have 20 LL credits I want to transfer do they need to match course for course to the school I am transfering them to?:confused:

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This is not a newbie question, this is actually pretty complex and took me years to understand. I was on my 15th year of department advising before I understood it lol. The short answer is - maybe. LL is more tricky than UL, and that's because of accreditation requirements for faculty actually. (hang in there, this isn't terribly confusing)

Ok, if the original credit was earned at a regionally accredited 2 year college (like a community college) and from the AA or AS track (not AOS or AAS) then it will be a smooth transfer. Courses in AA and AS tracks are typically called "college transfer credits" by colleges for this reason. An example would be English 101. If you transfer this to another school, it will show up as ENG101.
There are hundreds of traditional college transfer credits, and if you take these, you won't notice much change in the match.

If you take the course from an AOS or AAS department, all bets are off. These are considered applied technical, career, occupational, applied science, or similar name depending on your school. They all mean the same thing- they are NOT college transfer credits. Now,that doesn't mean you won't get any credit, but you are likely to not get general education credit.
Here is an example- say you are a culinary student at my college (AAS). You take a course called Nutrition with the number CUL210. The content is identical to our college's other Nutrition course called BIO210 Nutrition. The fact that these are the same course means nothing- the BIO210 will transfer in as a science course, the CUL course will transfer in as an elective.

There are reasons for this, mainly it is because of regional accreditation issues and the credential of the teacher- in the example above, the BIO course must be taught by a master degree holder while the CUL course can be taught by someone without a high school diploma. Crazy huh? The standard of faculty is to promise (sort of) other schools that the student will learn a common standard. It's a bit like standardizing without standardizing.

One last thing, even in AA / AS departments, you will find some conflict and you will get colleges that jack around your numbers. Case in point, I took a class locally with a number SOC210 but when I transferred it to TESC, they called it SOC199. The pain in that, is that bumping it down to a 100 level meant I couldn't use it in my major like I wanted to- it ended up in my general education electives, and I would have NEVER taken that path to earn some easy gen ed electives...I thought I was taking a class to meet an upper level in-major requirement. So, I fought it, and TESC said "lol, thank you drive through" :eek:

So, unless your college has written course to course equivalency chart on their web site, you'll be able to classify the credits, but probably not determine their number. (Many actually do have these data bases, and sometimes on their web site, University of Iowa has one for all the community colleges in the whole state)

Lastly, anything you take in the 100 level, will never go up.
200 levels can be classified as 100 or 200
300/400 will probably stay as 300/400

Before you move on, look at the link in my siggy line about how to do your own unofficial evaluation, there is more detail there. Hope that helps a little!