I would very much appreciate any help I can get from the forum. So here is my situation
I am a student from Vietnam and I’m currently enrolled in RMIT VN. I went to high school in Singapore and thus, I had the Singapore Cambridge GCE A level certificate. However, I’m planning to transfer to a US College and all of them requires that my high school in Singapore must physically mail my HS transcripts to them. This is where it becomes problematic because I have just recently contacted the school and the school doesn’t seem to have my full set of transcripts anymore, let alone mailing them to the college. In other words, it’s very hard if not almost impossible to ask them to help me with this. What should I do? I don’t want to wait until after undergraduate and then apply for graduate studies in the US because of personal family issues. Thus, that’s not an option for me.
Thank you very much for your help!
If neither you nor your school have retained records of your high school grades, it should be sufficient to send colleges a copy of your A-level, AS-level and O-level results. Have your school include a letter (on a school letterhead) stating that your transcripts were destroyed after you graduated.
As a transfer applicant, you should also have grades from your college courses? Those combined with your A-level results and SAT scores should give colleges a comprehensive-enough picture of your academic performance even without high school grades.
Hello b@r!um
Although I do have records of my high school grades, my school no longer has them in their database. Thus, I think that it would be hard for the colleges to consider my copies as official ones. But I will definitely take note of your suggestions. They’re very helpful. I will also email to college to see how it goes. Again, thank you for your help!
Americans consider anything that comes to them from your school as official, regardless of where the school got it from. (In Germany the “official” copy is the one handed to the student, and further official copies are obtained by getting a notarized copy of the original. When colleges wanted an official transcript from my school, I translated my own copy, my school put their seal on the translations and also a seal on sealed envelopes containing the translation, and I mailed all of together with my own application materials to colleges. Nobody complained.)
I see. Although I do still have a full record of my high school transcripts, some have gotten blurry due to an unfortunate accident. Furthermore, since the school no longer has my records in the database, I think asking them to put a seal on my copies may not work in my case. Furthermore, my form teacher, the only person who can verify the validity of my copies, has just retired from the education industry last year. Hence, I’m not sure if he will still be able to help me, but I can try. So, it turns out that officially, almost nobody can verify the validity of my copies, which puts me in a difficult situation.
Just ask if your A-level results will do. Odds are they will.