I recently spoke to a community college counselor that told me universities expect students to complete a series of classes at one college as opposed to multiple colleges. For example, taking all of the physics classes at college 1 instead of taking Mechanics at college 1 and Electricity and Magnetism at college 2 etc., with both colleges being in the same city. The repercussions being added difficulties in the students acceptance to the university. I have never heard this and it seems far fetched to me. I was wondering if anyone had any experience or knowledge to share on the subject. This is in California regarding mainly California schools but please don’t let that limit your comments.
With physics specifically, different colleges may cover topics in a different order, so mixing and matching physics courses from different colleges may result in useless duplication of some topics but missing coverage of other topics.
You can use http://www.assist.org to check the physics course articulation between the CCs and your target UCs and CSUs. These should say if a CC physics course maps one-to-one with a UC or CSU physics course, or if you need a sequence of CC physics courses to cover a sequence of UC or CSU physics courses.
Sometimes, more than one CC in a CC district will share the course catalog, so their courses may be interchangeable, although interchangeability is not always the case even within a CC district.
What helped our D who wanted to transfer from her CC to a private U was working with the admissions office at the U she wanted to transfer to and make SURE that the courses she took would transfer and help toward her degree. She was admitted and all but one of her classes transferred. I’d suggest you try a similar approach. USoCal, for example is excellent about helping students with this issue.
If the major will be engineering, I’d speak with the engineering school directly. They’re fairly picky. Our S took many APs in CS, math and physics and got 5s in all his tests but was required to re-take all the classes at USC.
Thank you for the responses. I go to a college like you mention, usbalumnus, that is within the same district as two others and they each offer the same course that satisfies the same requirements with UC and CSU schools, according to assist.org. Hlmom, I think I’ll take you up on your advise and speak to the admissions offices directly.
Note that USC does have articulation agreements with many California community colleges:
https://camel2.usc.edu/articagrmt/artic.aspx
It also does accept some AP credit for subject credit:
http://viterbi.usc.edu/students/undergrad/fye/orientation/apcredit.htm