I’m transferring from the honors program of one college to the CAS of a midsize research university. For the most part, my new college has been good about taking my credits in CAS subject areas. However, at my old school, most of my gen eds were fulfilled by honors program courses, and my new college is not accepting any credits from my honors classes. This puts me a semester behind on credits, and I frankly think it’s unfair that my gen ed courses are considered invalid just because they’re listed as “honors” and have an honors-specific course code. They were 4-credit liberal arts classes with letter grades, and I got above a B in all of them. Is this type of thing usually non-negotiable, or should I explain to the office which subjects my honors classes correspond to and beg them to give me credit for them? If not, is there anything else I can do? I really like this college and I don’t want to withdraw my enrollment/enroll elsewhere but I seriously can’t afford to lose all these gen eds for no reason.
Hard for anyone to help you without naming the colleges and the courses.
The new college may have specific policies on transfer credit, so you may want to read them to see if they were correctly applied in your case
It’s hard to know how fair or unfair it is from this distance, but it’s unlikely to be for “no reason” or just because of a name. Whether you agree with the reason is a different matter!
When you say ‘honors program courses’ do you mean classes that you took in HS? I’m assuming that you have checked the transfer credit policy- lots of places don’t accept dual-enrollment, AP or IB credits for transfers. If that’s the policy, there is little chance of changing it.
If these are courses that you took at your current college, the problem is more likely that in the view of the university they were not comparable in some key dimension to courses that you would have taken at their university. Can you align the courses you took with comparable courses (not just the subject area) at the new university? If so, emailing them with a copy of the course syllabus, and asking for a re-evaluation of the transfer credit can be successful.
Complaining about things being ‘unfair’ however, is kid stuff. You are an adult, negotiating with other adults. Treat it professionally, whether it ends up going your way or not.
When I transferred colleges I found the courses in the new college that most closely matched the ones I’d taken at the previous one. I took the course descriptions to my advisor. I think she took most, if not all, of them. it wouldn’t hurt to try. But don’t mention fairness. They want to see comparable coursework. It’s not about being fair or unfair.
Of course I will approach the office respectfully about this matter and not whine about things being unfair. That is just my personal opinion. It’s a great idea to find course descriptions and evidence of comparable coursework to bring to the office, so thank you to those who offered that suggestion. I will follow through on that.
Take the course syllabi, copies of the textbooks, and any graded homework that you still have. That will help the evaluators understand the breath and depth of the topics covered in the courses.