I’m a student at UC Merced. And evidently my particular UC has made it purposefully difficult for students to transfer out of here, because the courses we take here do not articulate with ANY OTHER COLLEGE. They’ve created their own “categories” of classes to fulfill the UC general education requirements, and none of them articulate anywhere else. Not even the other UC’s. We have a course here that is considered a critical thinking course, but it doesn’t appear as such to any of the colleges I’ve looked at, that require completion of a critical thinking class. This apparently is well known among my peers, and it seems I was the last one to find out.
I have a 3.8. I’ve worked so hard to achieve an outstanding academic performance, even have a few extracurriculars under my belt, and now I feel like no one will take me as a transfer student. It’s a fine school but I am not happy here, and I don’t know what to do.
Since most transfer students in California are coming from CCs, the pre-set articulation agreements on http://www.assist.org mostly cover courses from CCs, not courses from UCs or CSUs, so any articulation would be determined on an individual basis after transfer matriculation.
So what should I do? Should I call the campuses I apply to and explain the nature of my transfer courses?
You may want to attempt a transfer to the less impacted CSU’s.
The UCs are impacted but CCC students are the feeder students and priority goes to them first.
Merced is trying hard to graduate their students, so, that may be an issue when you want to get out of Dodge City there. Once you matriculated to Merced, there was no guarantee that you could directly transfer to another UC.
Many UC campuses and divisions accept UC reciprocity. This means that if you complete all GE requirements at your current UC campus and get a letter to that effect, you may be considered to have completed the GE requirements at the UC campus you transfer to. Not all divisions at all campuses accept UC reciprocity. For example, the Berkeley College of Letters and Science accepts UC reciprocity, but the Berkeley College of Engineering apparently does not. At UCSD, Revelle does not accept it, but the other colleges do accept it as fulfillment of lower division GE requirements. This is similar conceptually to IGETC for transfers coming from community colleges.
http://ssha-advising.ucmerced.edu/policies-and-guidelines/uc-letter-reciprocity
https://ns-advising.ucmerced.edu/policies/ns-academic-policies/uc-reciprocity