HELP ！ACE and NCCRS credits are not recognized by US graduate schools

[qiaoyiren]

I understand some US graduate schools do not recognize those non-regionally accredited credits. I transferred in 113 credits to Excelsior College, and I am applying for a graduate program, and then they replied to me.
"Please note, we do not typically accept LLCs or study.com as valid credits for a degree."
"To be able to review this previous educational history we will need to see either a WES or ECE evaluation, against US degree types, for the transcripts mentioned. The transfer credits you listed are not associated to a degree program at a university, therefore we cannot verify that they would count as credits to a US degree."

I would like to ask if my 113 ACE and NCCRS would be recognized by WES or ECE ?

Thank you so much for your help !

---

I asked WES and ECE, and they do not provide service for US credentials evaluations.

[bjcheung77]

AICE and NACES members do not evaluate non academic credit from ACE/NCCRS providers, they should only be evaluating institutions (colleges, institutes, universities, etc). You're providing a puzzle for people to complete for you, but you're only giving half the pieces, you really need to give us the University, the degree you're applying to so we can investigate alternatives or provide feedback, they may have options to get in using conditional acceptance, etc. Do your due diligence and research, but also provide us more details on what the degree/institutions you're going for is...

[Jonathan Whatley]

"The transfer credits you listed are not associated to a degree program at a university"

But it sounds like they are associated to a degree program at a university, your degree program at Excelsior University. (Have you completed the degree at Excelsior yet?)

[davewill]

Generally speaking, a graduate program looks at two things, that you have a valid bachelor's degree, and that you have coursework that fulfills any prerequisites the program requires. I would not be surprised at all if a grad program refused to accept alt credit for their prerequisites, but I would be surprised if they cared about the other credits. Of course, any individual program can be as picky as they wish.

The answer to your problem is going to be applying to other programs. We know that many people have successfully gone on to master's and doctorate programs with bachelor's degrees full of alt credit, so this is not a widespread problem.

[qiaoyiren]

AICE and NACES members do not evaluate non academic credit from ACE/NCCRS providers, they should only be evaluating institutions (colleges, institutes, universities, etc).  You're providing a puzzle for people to complete for you, but you're only giving half the pieces, you really need to give us the University, the degree you're applying to so we can investigate alternatives or provide feedback, they may have options to get in using conditional acceptance, etc.  Do your due diligence and research, but also provide us more details on what the degree/institutions you're going for is...

I am sorry.

I have a BSc in Liberal Arts from Excelsior College and a MSc in Advanced Cyber Security from King's College London, and I am applying for PhD programs in Computer Science(cybersecurity major) since April. This is from Michigan Tech University,and they are not willing to accept my BSc transcripts.

---

"The transfer credits you listed are not associated to a degree program at a university"

But it sounds like they are associated to a degree program at a university, your degree program at Excelsior University. (Have you completed the degree at Excelsior yet?)

Yes, I completed the degree at Excelsior in 2021.  I think this is very confusing and so are they, they have rejected my BSc transcript 3 times. They first asked me for an associate's degree transcript, and I said I didn't have one. I uploaded the transcripts from study.com, sophia.org and coopersmith, but they directly rejected it. They asked me again for an associate's degree transcript. After they finally understood, they said they were unable to accept these LLC and study.com credits.

---

Generally speaking, a graduate program looks at two things, that you have a valid bachelor's degree, and that you have coursework that fulfills any prerequisites the program requires. I would not be surprised at all if a grad program refused to accept alt credit for their prerequisites, but I would be surprised if they cared about the other credits. Of course, any individual program can be as picky as they wish.

The answer to your problem is going to be applying to other programs. We know that many people have successfully gone on to master's and doctorate programs with bachelor's degrees full of alt credit, so this is not a widespread problem.

Yes, I understand, I got a MSc degree with this bachelor's degree. I am not sure if this university will continue my PhD application. Maybe they believe 113 alt credits do not make sense, since I only had 7 credits from Excelsior College.

[bjcheung77]

A short recap from your answers: "This is from Michigan Tech University, and they are not willing to accept my BSc transcripts." "They asked me again for an associate's degree transcript. After they finally understood, they said they were unable to accept these LLC and study.com credits." "I am not sure if this university will continue my PhD application."

From the looks of things, they may or may not accept your previous undergraduate credits. It's hard to say, I would have backup options just in case, and you may want to again ask them again, just to make sure they would accept your RA Bachelors as is, indicate to them these are alternative credit transfers from ACE providers and link them to the ACE website.

[sanantone]

Explain to them that these are non-collegiate sources of credit and provide the link below so they can become familiar with their own terminology. Michigan Tech accepts non-collegiate sources of credit but only for military training and credit-by-exam. Unless they specifically state that prerequisite courses must be from a regionally accredited college, Excelsior's policy on accepting non-collegiate sources of credit via ACE or NCCRS should have no bearing on their admissions decision. They are not considering your undergraduate credits for transfer to a doctoral program. Either your bachelor's and master's degrees meet their accreditation requirements or they don't.

https://www.mtu.edu/senate/policies-proc...ies/307.1/

[qiaoyiren]

A short recap from your answers: "This is from Michigan Tech University, and they are not willing to accept my BSc transcripts." "They asked me again for an associate's degree transcript. After they finally understood, they said they were unable to accept these LLC and study.com credits." "I am not sure if this university will continue my PhD application."

From the looks of things, they may or may not accept your previous undergraduate credits.  It's hard to say, I would have backup options just in case, and you may want to again ask them again, just to make sure they would accept your RA Bachelors as is, indicate to them these are alternative credit transfers from ACE providers and link them to the ACE website.

Thank you for your advice. Yes, I am applying to multiple universities at the same time !

---

Explain to them that these are non-collegiate sources of credit and provide the link below so they can become familiar with their own terminology. Michigan Tech accepts non-collegiate sources of credit but only for military training and credit-by-exam. Unless they specifically state that prerequisite courses must be from a regionally accredited college, Excelsior's policy on accepting non-collegiate sources of credit via ACE or NCCRS should have no bearing on their admissions decision. They are not considering your undergraduate credits for transfer to a doctoral program. Either your bachelor's and master's degrees meet their accreditation requirements or they don't.

https://www.mtu.edu/senate/policies-proc...ies/307.1/

This is a very good point, and I appreciate your wording. I hope this will work !

[eLearner]

The person who told you to get U.S. credits evaluated by a foreign credential evaluator clearly has no clue what they're doing and probably shouldn't be doing that job, smh. That's the kind of ignorance you'd expect on Reddit.

[sanantone]

When I applied to a nursing program at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, they requested a foreign credit evaluation for Davar Academy. I sent them an email explaining that Davar is not a college and is a business that offers college-level courses evaluated by NCCRS for equivalency. They immediately dropped it from the list of schools I needed to provide transcripts for.

Since Michigan Tech doesn't accept alternative sources of credit, with the exception of military training and challenge exams, their evaluators are not going to be trained on ACE and NCCRS credits. They're going too see if a provider is in a database of U.S. accredited colleges. If it's not in there, then they're going to assume that it's a foreign school. I put the blame on the university for not training them on what non-collegiate sources of credit look like.