Hello everyone, so I have decided to go back to a community college. It has been about 10 years since I last went to school. I am currently attempting to enroll in a community college, however, when I look at my transcripts from another community college I last attended before I had dropped out I realized I have a lot of W’s and F’s. I am turning in my transcripts from my old community college to the new school I am attending so that they can determine what classes I should take, however, along with that I fear that it will also transfer all my past F’s and W’s. I don’t know what to do.
You need to give them your old transcripts.
However, what happened 10 years ago is in the very distant past. There have been many other cases of students who were bad students when coming out of high school, but a few years later have matured and become very good students. Schools know that we are people, and are not perfect beings. If you start stringing together semesters with strong grades, schools will see that with maturity you have become a strong student.
You don’t need to forget the past. You just need to learn from it and do better in the future.
You are not alone. You may start out on academic probation but when you establish a good track record of excellent grades you may be able to apply for academic renewal, in which your previous grades are expunged. Ask the counselor about the steps for achieving academic renewal.
Most CC’s are moving toward a system of directed self-placement for English and math, which means you can decide what course you take as your entry point. In fact, as of Jan. 1, the law is that you cannot be made to take developmental courses (previously called remedial courses), though I still think such courses are both helpful and necessary for many students. My advice is to take the assessment tests, but also have a look at the curriculum for the level of math and English right above and below where you placed. You can do that by going to the bookstore and looking at the books for those courses; this is especially true in math because it’s more straightforward. For English, you could even go to the English Division and speak with a professor. If you sit down for a half hour beforehand and write out (without the help of grammar checkers) a good chunk of prose, that will help English give you good advice about what course to start in. Some people get much better in reading and writing after ten years out of school; others get much worse in those skills. So there’s no way of knowing where you are without some reality check from the people who actually teach those courses. Your Ws and Fs will probably just be replaced with your new grades once you have repeated those same courses, but the counselor will be able to tell you how that works at your school. Good luck! I teach in a CC, and most of my “returning” students enjoy it very much the second time around.