GPA and Transferring Credits

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No.

WGU does not give a 3.0 GPA.

They officially state that their "PASS" grade on transcripts is equivalent to at least a 3.0, but they do not award an "automatic" 3.0. your WGU transcript will have no GPA.

Hi jsd! thank you very much for the clarification. Appreciate it!

Hello everyone,

I would like to ask a question to all of the WGU Alumni's out here who transferred traditional brick and mortar "BM" university credits to WGU.

So if I understand it correctly WGU graduates gets an automatic final GPA of "3.0". But what is not clear to me is if the transferred "BM" GPA gets calculated along the automatic "3.0".

My end goal is to get a Master's degree in Cybersecurity at Georgia Tech and their minimum requirement is "3.0" GPA.

On my transfer evaluation, which I transferred in 6 courses from a FOREIGN "BM" university, the transfer is "2.44" GPA. I already sent an e-mail to my Enrollment Advisor to seek clarification, but while I wait for that, I would like to ask everyone's opinion on this.

Also, Should I just cancel the transferred 6 BM courses and just replace them with courses at Study.com or Straighterline?

First of all, your Institutional GPA always lives with the school you earned the credits at. You cannot transfer to a new school to avoid the GPA you earned at a prior school. Every new school will want to see original transcripts for all the colleges you attended in the past and they will use those to determine what your transfer GPA will be (if they care about that). So your institutional GPA at each school only includes the courses taken from that school... it never includes courses transferred in.

Secondly, every school uses its own methodology for how they calculate transfer GPA. For example, many graduate schools will only look at the most recent (or highest level) 60 credits on your transcript. Others may only look at the courses that are considered prerequisites for entry when calculating the transfer GPA for entrance purposes. However, in most cases, schools will either ignore ungraded (PASS/FAIL) courses when calculating transfer GPA, or if they include them they may assign a C (2.0) grade for each PASS. So taking courses from Study.com or SL will not influence your GPA from a prior school.

If you are looking to improve your transfer GPA, that usually means taking enough additional graded courses (with high scores) at a new school such that your average GPA increases. However, if you have some F's or D's at your old school holding you back, many schools will allow you to improve your GPA by retaking the courses from the original school –– doing so will allow you to either replace your old grade or average in the new score with the old one to see a net improvement.

Lastly, to clarify how GPA works at WGU, as others have said, you will earn a PASS for every course you successfully complete at WGU. This will show on your transcript as a PASS, which has no GPA at most schools. However, WGU does recommend on the transcript that their courses be evaluated such that a PASS is equivalent to a 3.0 on the 4.0 scale (a "B" grade). Most school credit evaluators appear to honor this request, but no schools are required to do so.

Also keep in mind that most grad schools are unlikely to recognize any courses taken from StraighterLine or Study.com since they are not RA courses. This means they will be ignored for purposes of GPA calculation. It also means that if you have any prerequisite courses required for entrance, make sure you take them at an actual college and not from SDC or SL.

So, to sum up, any grad school you attend is going to look at the transcripts from each school you attended. Assuming they don't recalculate the transfer GPA based on specific courses or a specific number of credits, they will take the 2.44 GPA from your old school and they will either blend that with the 3.0 GPA from WGU or they will ignore the WGU courses for GPA purposes. So you will end up with either a 2.44 transfer GPA, or somewhere between 2.44 and 3.0 transfer GPA depending on how many courses were taken from each school. GA Tech appears to honor the 3.0 GPA equivalency from WGU, so it will likely be a blended GPA.

So if you are looking to boost your transfer GPA to a 3.0 or better, you should either go back to your old school to see if you can retake some old courses to replace any D or F grades, or plan to attend a new school where you will earn graded credits and try to get enough A's to bring that 2.44 GPA up to at least a 3.0. WGU is not going to have much of an impact on your GPA, if any.

Alternately, since you're talking about foreign credits, if you haven't sent them to WGU yet you may be able to just not do so and take those 6 courses from WGU. You could take them from SL or SDC but you should only consider that if those courses aren't part of your degree core. (Note: Courses taken at US schools are registered at the national clearinghouse, so not including the transcript doesn't help as they will be discovered by the destination school at some point. Either at degree audit time or maybe earlier if you apply for financial aid. This is done to make sure people aren't trying to avoid paying money owed to other schools.) This is no longer an option if you've already sent the transcript to WGU, since they will appear on your record so future schools will see and request the transcripts for them.

Wow! Thank you very much Merlin for thoroughly explaining all my options. Now I have the full understanding of how GPA calculation works.

I guess it was all to late for me since WGU have evaluated my foreign credit. But I will still try, I already set an appointment with an enrollment counselor this coming Wednesday, I will plead to her my case if I can still withdraw my foreign credits and delete it from my record because of my very bad GPA of 2.44 .