transcripts being held hostage

[futuremrsmlb]

I emailed TESU a while back inquiring about this very thing. I took classes at CapellaU. My financial aid package was revised and which means I did not have enough money to cover the course. I owe $3k+ and honestly dont have the means to pay.

Admissions informed me that ALL transcripts were required and I should wait until I can send ALL transcripts before applying.
I sent the same emails to COSC and got the same reply. When they say ALL, they mean ALL transcripts.
Even if you don't list this school they will find out through the student clearinghouse.

[clep3705]

If you don't use financial aid and you tell the schools you attended to not report to the National Student Clearinghouse, it might be possible to forget you went to a particular school.

[jsd]

You can ask schools not to report but they're under no obligation to comply and will likely still report. It's been determined that reporting to the Clearinghouse doesn't violate FERPA (somehow)

[AwardTour]

You might want to order a transcript for yourself, just to see what they say. When I went to college, even if I didn't withdraw from a course, I didn't always get an F - I got an I (incomplete) for some, which did not give me a GPA. If a school sees that you didn't go to a single class for an entire semester, they may have given you something like that, or withdrawn you for the entire semester, and you may have no GPA there at all.

If you do have a GPA of 0.0, then you may have a problem, but you can figure that out after you know for certain what you have. They may be willing to change it to all I's or something (whatever they give there), or have some other way to help you.

You can also ask TESU what would happen in that situation, if you have an old transcript with all F's. They may have some sort of forgiveness program or something.

I know when I transferred all my credits to WVNCC, they had a policy of not counting bad grades older than a certain number of years old. TESU may do that or something like it, who knows.

Thanks for the reply dfrecore. Its been a few years but I think I have a GPA of 0.0 which is why I was placed on academic probation 15 years ago. Maybe the community college I went to has an "academic forgiveness" policy and I can get my record scrubbed? I will need to look into it. I don't plan on using financial aid at all so I might go the the route of just no mentioning anything. I will need to do some research.

[dfrecore]

Thanks for the reply dfrecore. Its been a few years but I think I have a GPA of 0.0 which is why I was placed on academic probation 15 years ago. Maybe the community college I went to has an "academic forgiveness" policy and I can get my record scrubbed? I will need to look into it. I don't plan on using financial aid at all so I might go the the route of just no mentioning anything. I will need to do some research.

Unfortunately, no one will "scrub" your record. And, even if you don't use financial aid, most schools still require you to send ALL transcripts. So you actually, probably need to deal with this. Either you can contact the school and see if they do grade replacement (you retake the courses there, and they only count the better grade). Or you take different courses at other schools that give grades, until you get your GPA up to a reasonable one. That, unfortunately, is hard to do - for every F, you'd need an A, just to get a 2.0.

I too had bad grades from my first college, a 1.9 GPA. I ended up going to a few more schools over the years, and got good enough GPA's to make up for the bad grades - but that's a LOT of classes I took to get to that point.

Others here may have some additional advice for you.

[AwardTour]

Unfortunately, no one will "scrub" your record. And, even if you don't use financial aid, most schools still require you to send ALL transcripts. So you actually, probably need to deal with this. Either you can contact the school and see if they do grade replacement (you retake the courses there, and they only count the better grade). Or you take different courses at other schools that give grades, until you get your GPA up to a reasonable one. That, unfortunately, is hard to do - for every F, you'd need an A, just to get a 2.0.

I too had bad grades from my first college, a 1.9 GPA. I ended up going to a few more schools over the years, and got good enough GPA's to make up for the bad grades - but that's a LOT of classes I took to get to that point.

Others here may have some additional advice for you.

"Scrub" is the wrong word for me to pick. Here in Texas where I live they actually do have an "Academic Forgiveness" policy. https://www1.dcccd.edu/catalog/GeneralIn...m?loc=econ They will ignore credits over 10 years old if the student chooses to do so. Maybe it is possible for me to take just 1 Class and do well and use that as my GPA. It might bring up the odd scenario of TESU seeing my old failed classes yet my GPA will be based on just the one class being taken. This is an odd scenario. So nothing is getting "scrubbed" or erased on my record here in Texas. The local colleges will simply ignore the old classes and recalculate my GPA based on any new classes that I take. How will TESU react to that? I will need to find out.

[AwardTour]

OK, I couldn't take it anymore. I picked up the phone and called the TESU admissions dept to get some answers. They told me for undergrad degrees they do not require transcripts to be submitted unless I am trying to transfer credits in.She told me that what I described applies to graduate level degrees only. Looks like I have nothing to worry about assuming the person on the phone knew what they were talking about. I mentioned that the advice I heard at an online message board (didn't name names) runs counter to what she just told me. She confidently said and I even made her repeat herself a third time that transcripts do not have to be submitted unless you want to get credit is for undergrad degrees only.

I've heard a few people say that it is not uncommon to hear different things from different people at TESU but I can't imagine someone in the admissions department getting a basic and commonly asked question like this wrong. I will be calling again on another day to confirm again.

[davewill]

OK, I couldn't take it anymore. I picked up the phone and called the TESU admissions dept to get some answers. They told me for undergrad degrees they do not require transcripts to be submitted unless I am trying to transfer credits in.She told me that what I described applies to graduate level degrees only. Looks like I have nothing to worry about assuming the person on the phone knew what they were talking about. I mentioned that the advice I heard at an online message board (didn't name names) runs counter to what she just told me. She confidently said and I even made her repeat herself a third time that transcripts do not have to be submitted unless you want to get credit is for undergrad degrees only.

I've heard a few people say that it is not uncommon to hear different things from different people at TESU but I can't imagine someone in the admissions department getting a basic and commonly asked question like this wrong. I will be calling again on another day to confirm again.

That's what I had remembered, but when Sanantone corrected me and added catalog citations, I assumed I was just wrong. Now, I guess, we don't know.

[dfrecore]

"Scrub" is the wrong word for me to pick. Here in Texas where I live they actually do have an "Academic Forgiveness" policy. https://www1.dcccd.edu/catalog/GeneralIn...m?loc=econ They will ignore credits over 10 years old if the student chooses to do so. Maybe it is possible for me to take just 1 Class and do well and use that as my GPA. It might bring up the odd scenario of TESU seeing my old failed classes yet my GPA will be based on just the one class being taken. This is an odd scenario. So nothing is getting "scrubbed" or erased on my record here in Texas. The local colleges will simply ignore the old classes and recalculate my GPA based on any new classes that I take. How will TESU react to that? I will need to find out.

With academic forgiveness, a school is has decided they aren't going to look at classes over a certain number of years old if they have bad grades. It doesn't change the transcript at all for the originating school.

It's similar to when a school only looks at your "last 60 graded credits" or "last 30 graded credits" or "credits in the core competency." So if you're trying to go to a school for your MBA (as an example), they don't care if you got a D in History when you were 18. They are bringing over classes and calculating their own GPA for purposes of admissions. It doesn't change what happened at the school you took the courses with the bad grades.

Even then, they still want to see the transcripts (usually). They can then choose to give academic forgiveness at their discretion.

EDIT POST:

Just looked at the link, the college still requires all of your transcripts before they will grant academic forgiveness, and then it's an all or nothing type of deal: either you can choose to have all of your courses looked at from 10+ years ago, or none of them. So if you got a few bad grades, but many good/decent ones, you're kind of screwed. Or if you had terrible grades 20 years ago, but went back to school 11 years ago and got all A's, you're screwed for certain.

I prefer an academic fresh start where they just drop your bad grades, but keep the good ones. Here's the one from WVNCC:

Academic Forgiveness: All F’s earned in College courses earned four or more years before admission to program are disregarded from the computation of the graduation grade point average. The “F” grades will not be deleted from the transcript.

By the way, this still has nothing to do with TESU. If you got academic forgiveness at one school and went there for a degree (let's say an AA), and then transferred to TESU, TESU will still want to see all of your transcripts from previous schools. They will not look at the school that gave you forgiveness and use THEIR grading system as a replacement for their own evaluation of transcripts.

[davewill]

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