Can your Sophia credits be rejected when applying for a Master?

[rachel83az]

It really depends on the university. Yes, they will want to see your transcripts. In most cases, they won't care where your Gen Ed credits come from. Sophia is not that dissimilar from CLEP exams, and CLEP exams have been known for decades.

The original poster of that Reddit thread is completely wrong. You might not be able to get into, say, an MIT Master's program with Sophia credits. But MIT barely accepts non-MIT university credits in the first place. That is, if you start at somewhere like UCLA and manage to transfer to MIT in the second year of your Bachelor's degree, you might have to start 100% from scratch!

However, plenty of students have used Sophia, Study.com, Coopersmith, etc. credits and have gone on to get degrees from well-ranked universities. I don't know about the University of Toronto specifically. You'd need to contact their graduate program(s) yourself.

The exception to Sophia courses being fine is if the graduate program has certain very specific requirements. For instance, if they want "Biology I w/ Lab" as part of the requirements to enter their pre-Med program, they might only accept an in-person biology class. They probably would not accept Human Biology w/ Lab from Sophia. In essence, unless it is a specific requirement of the degree program, it's unlikely that the university will care where the credits came from - so long as the degree itself is legit.

It does get a little complicated when crossing borders, but Canada is probably going to be the most open to accepting alt credits simply by virtue of being so close to the US as to be more familiar with the system than other countries might be.