Ace Credits and Master Degrees

[Merlin]

Hi guys anyone has any idea about i'm currently doing my gen eds at sophia and i will continue my education in europe with a B&M university for masters degree. But some people says that many college won't accept those sophia credits and you are gonna retake them. Is that true? Those credits looks like a "CR" on my transcript. Couldn't i do my masters with that transcript? What should i do? Thanks in advance. I'm a Cs Major student btw.

ACE credits, in general, are not accepted in a lot of schools. Grad schools in particular are less likely to accept them as being equivalent to traditional courses if they represent prerequisites or are part of the core courses required for GPA calculation or admittance into a competitive degree program.

If you think you'll want to apply to a competitive graduate degree program after completing your bachelor's degree, you should investigate what the requirements are at your target school(s). Many competitive grad schools require a minimum GPA and/or minimum grades in prerequisite courses for admittance.

All schools have their own method for how they calculate incoming GPA, but the common methods include looking at the most recent (highest level) 60 credits in your degree or looking at the prerequisite courses required for entrance to the degree and calculating GPA from there. For this purpose, ACE courses will likely be ignored for GPA purposes and may limit your options for admittance. At best they may provisionally admit you pending completion of "leveling courses" (which means retaking the undergrad courses from them and basing GPA off those courses). Alternatively, they may require placement exams to test your programming and math skills for entry if you don't meet the entry prerequisites.

So for a CS degree, you'll want to make sure that your core CS courses come from an RA school if you want them considered for entry. Ideally, you'll also want them to come with high grades, or at least not poor grades. So you don't want to take all your core CS courses from ACE providers, as that is likely going to make it difficult for your grad school application to be considered (at least not without significant support), and you may end up having to retake many, most, or all of them anyway at full tuition prices from your target school.

When I say core CS courses, I'm referring to foundational CS topics like Calculus, Linear Algebra, Discrete Math, Statistics/Probability, Data Structures & Algorithms, Object-Oriented Design, Programming Languages, Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, etc. There isn't a definitive list since each school or degree program will have their list of prerequisites, or may just have general topics that need to be represented on your transcript.

If you're looking at less competitive schools, they may waive specific course prerequisites if you have a bachelor's in CS or a related degree. That is the best-case scenario if most of your core CS courses come from ACE providers.